If you follow the well famous television series, The Big Bang Theory, you must be remembering the following episode where in a scene Sheldon comes to Penny and asks for bread!
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Penny: Sheldon, come in.
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Sheldon: Thank you. I’d like to make a sandwich, but I’m out of bread.
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Penny: There’s some in the fridge.
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Sheldon: You shouldn’t keep your bread in the refrigerator. Staleness is caused by crystallization of the starch molecules, which occurs faster at cool temperatures.
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Penny: On Earth, we say thank you.
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Penny kept her bread in a fridge and Sheldon got a chance to lecture about the effects on the bread. A funny scene scene, but also a truth!
But, I have a method which can bring back that stale and dried, or a cold-dead bread back to life! I accidentally discovered it when I was cooking a chicken for myself using the oven. I have those not-so-fancy electric ovens for my personal non-vegetarian cooking late at nights. After finishing to cook the chicken, I planed to re-heat the Diwali left-over sweets, actually a Gulab-Jamun in the same pre-heated oven.
I also realized that I am out of rice and hence was planning to eat that cold-dead bread! The idea of re-heating that bread & sweets together was a good idea, which I implemented well.
I am not sure what came into my drunken mind (a few pegs of scotch turns everyone into a super-thinking-machine) when I pour some water in the baking tray and placed a grill in the oven. I then kept the Gulab-Jamun in that water filled tray and cold bread on the steel-grill which was placed at the top of this tray.
After few minutes, as obvious the sweets were nicely heated and then I checked the bread. Wow! I see the bread was not only heated but was as moist and fresh as it was made a few hours back!
The water in the baking tray created vapors that brought back the moisture and that subtle heat of the oven and the water vapors made the bread warm, further making it very soft and it smelled really fresh!
Well, I am a scientific mind too;
I then tried applying butter on the bread by making a humble butter sandwich. Did the whole thing again and surprisingly the butter melted very nicely in the bread and did all those good things to bring back the dead-bread to life!
So, no toasting of the old bread to hide its age. No, throwing away of the bread which is forgotten in the fridge for several days. A boon for people like us who eat bread as SoS food supplement. An advantage for food joints too!
But hey Sheldon, can you put your scientific comment on this one?
