How to Defrost Bread

By GratefulSea

Source: http://www.extracrispy.com/food/3788/how-to-defrost-bread-without-destroying-it?utm_source=extracrispy.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=well-done&utm_content=20170824

Ingredients

• bread

Preparation

Step 1

Once you're ready to defrost the bread, you have two options. The first is pretty straightforward. Preheat your oven to 350°F, take the bread out of the freezer, remove the plastic, and place the whole frozen loaf into the now-hot oven. Let the loaf bake for about 40 minutes to revive it. While 40 minutes sounds like a long time, this particular procedure works great, according to Carollo, leaving you with bread that smells and tastes like it's freshly baked (because it kind of is).

If you don't want to run your oven that long though, you can first let the loaf of bread defrost on your counter for a few hours. Once it's soft, take the plastic off the bread, and bake the loaf in the oven at 350°F for 10 or 15 minutes. Be sure to keep the loaf inside the plastic wrap as it comes to room temperature. Otherwise you'll lose all the moisture, and the defrosted bread will be sad and dry.

Don't try to refreeze defrosted bread. "Once you put it in the oven like this, you should plan to consume whatever whole piece you have at one sitting," Carollo says. "Heating it up again will release the water cells and make it seem moist and steamy like it just came out of an oven. But then it will lose all of that moisture." Trying to refreeze the loaf will be pointless because it'll get rock hard.

That's why Carollo recommends freezing the loaf in smaller chunks, even going so far as cutting the bread into slices before wrapping it in plastic and freezing. That way, he explains, "you can get a really nice effect by just popping it into a toaster. Then you can eat the loaf one slice at a time for as long as that takes you," rather than sit there and eat an entire defrosted loaf in a single sitting. (But if that's what you're into, there's no judgment here.)