Are there advantages to buying unsliced bread?
August 11, 2024 1:16 AM Subscribe
Out of convenience I've always bought pre-sliced bread. I'm wondering if the alternative--buying whole, unsliced loaves--might be a better choice re taste, freshness, and shelf life. Thanks!
For me it's just the ability to control thickness. Any improved flavor or freshness was minuscule.
posted by Czjewel at 3:18 AM on August 11
posted by Czjewel at 3:18 AM on August 11
We buy unsliced sourdough. Along with last night's pasta we chunked up bread with olive oil & balsamic. Sliced no do dat.
posted by whatevernot at 4:11 AM on August 11 [3 favorites]
posted by whatevernot at 4:11 AM on August 11 [3 favorites]
The best bread isn’t usually pre-sliced, so upgrading will surely involve slicing your own. NB it may cost more and cutting bread is actually a minor skill that has to be learnt.
posted by Phanx at 4:24 AM on August 11 [5 favorites]
posted by Phanx at 4:24 AM on August 11 [5 favorites]
In general when buying bread, I find the unsliced loaves tend to be made with fewer preservatives and so they go stale faster (unless you’re just buying the exact same bread sliced.) This can also depend on the type of bread - a lean dough like a baguette won’t last as long as a dough with more fat like a challah.
Usually I make my own bread and because it has no commercial gums or preservatives it goes stale (and if left, mouldy) the fastest. Panzanella salad is great for using up stale bread.
For me I prefer that to the commercial ingredients but if you’re looking for long-lasting bread and buy a different type unsliced it may not be the best choice.
posted by warriorqueen at 4:25 AM on August 11 [9 favorites]
Usually I make my own bread and because it has no commercial gums or preservatives it goes stale (and if left, mouldy) the fastest. Panzanella salad is great for using up stale bread.
For me I prefer that to the commercial ingredients but if you’re looking for long-lasting bread and buy a different type unsliced it may not be the best choice.
posted by warriorqueen at 4:25 AM on August 11 [9 favorites]
I sometimes buy unsliced bread from the same local bakery that I buy sliced bread from.
You make a lot of crumbs slicing yourself. Controlling thickness isn't that useful to me. Fresh bread with no preservatives does go bad faster. One advantage for unsliced here is if it starts to mold, the mold stays on the surface, and can be easily cut off. If the bread is pre-sliced, the mold tracks in between slices, so you lose more bread faster. Sliced bread is easily frozen and retains most of its fresh character, and that just doesn't work out with unsliced bread since you can't usually cut it while frozen.
I think you're better off looking for good artisanal locally baked bread, however it comes, rather than prioritizing un-sliced per se.
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:39 AM on August 11 [3 favorites]
You make a lot of crumbs slicing yourself. Controlling thickness isn't that useful to me. Fresh bread with no preservatives does go bad faster. One advantage for unsliced here is if it starts to mold, the mold stays on the surface, and can be easily cut off. If the bread is pre-sliced, the mold tracks in between slices, so you lose more bread faster. Sliced bread is easily frozen and retains most of its fresh character, and that just doesn't work out with unsliced bread since you can't usually cut it while frozen.
I think you're better off looking for good artisanal locally baked bread, however it comes, rather than prioritizing un-sliced per se.
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:39 AM on August 11 [3 favorites]
It depends on the bread. You can buy unsliced bread that is almost as unhealthy and tasteless as the sliced bread, and in some places, they will slice up a freshly made from scratch sourdough bread on request. But the point is that they have to add a lot of not-really-food chemicals to make sliced wheat bread keep fresh and soft in the bag. The additives are bad for your gut health, for reasons that aren't entirely understood yet, even though the effect is well documented.
For some reason, sourdough whole rye keeps better and needs less preservatives to last even when sliced, I don't remember why, but I think it is something about the acid and moisture.
In general, freshly baked bread is much tastier and more filling than pre-sliced bread, which is one of the reasons it is healthier: I can easily eat half a loaf of sliced bread, but 2-3 slices of a freshly baked bread satiate me in the best possible way. Also, I have never met a sliced wheat bread that doesn't contain sugar. I think sugar is necessary for the industrial process.
As a thought example, if you bake a sandwich-style yeasted bread from scratch, with or without wholegrain flour but without preservatives or emulsifiers, it will start going stale within 12 hours of coming out of the oven. Then you can still use it for toast the next 2-3 days if kept in a plastic bag. But after that, you want to let it go stale (dry) outside of the bag deliberately, so mold doesn't develop, and you can use it for making breadcrumbs and croutons or bread salads like the panzanella mentioned by warriorqueen. Breadcrumbs and croutons have a long shelf life, but if they have a high fat content, they can go rancid. So keep in a sealed jar in a dark place. I'm just using sandwich bread as an example, there are variations among bread types, with whole rye sourdough being the most durable and baguettes probably the least, though sourdough versions last longer than yeast-based bread. There is a reason the French traditionally buy bread twice a day.
Supermarket in-store bakers usually use baking mixes that are only slightly better than the sliced bread you can find in the bread aisle, but if you have a reputable baker in your neighborhood, what you can do is slice up the whole bread when you come home, and freeze what you don't need in smaller bags. This frozen home-sliced bread lasts for ever and is as healthy and almost as tasty as freshly-baked bread. It's best as toast, though.
Taste is a complicated issue. I do love a classic white sliced bread, not least because it was one of the things I really enjoyed as a child in England. Today 99% of the time, if I eat it, I bake it myself, but the reality is that it doesn't taste like the supermarket version, so once or twice a year I buy half a loaf and make those nostalgic egg or coronation chicken sandwiches I crave. But they are not healthy at all and I can actually feel it. My blood sugar rises, I get candida issues and often also skin stuff.
But I also really like whole grain sourdough breads and they are much better for me. A local baker, who does the slicing thing, makes a white sourdough bread that is excellent for those foods where whole grain is overpowering, like a shrimp sandwich. They make the same in a whole grain version too.
And as said above, whole grain rye without additives, sliced or not, can be bought in many places and is both healthy, tasty and durable. IMO German and Danish styles are the best, but YMMV. NYC Jewish deli style rye with caraway seed is very delicious but doesn't keep as well so you have to use the freezer method.
You didn't ask about this, but finally I will recommend learning to bake your own bread. You save a lot of money and can control what is in your bread which is important because good quality baker's bread is expensive. I have baked for more than 40 years and it has been a process. I still haven't mastered rye bread. But today there are YouTubers and lots of online information that make it far easier to learn to bake than it was when I started. A sandwich/pullman bread can be mastered after a few tries by almost anyone.
On the other hand, even though good bread is costly compared to supermarket bread, it's like with dried pasta or canned tomatoes: even the very expensive breads (or pasta or tomatoes) are cheap food compared with beef or seafood.
posted by mumimor at 5:21 AM on August 11 [10 favorites]
For some reason, sourdough whole rye keeps better and needs less preservatives to last even when sliced, I don't remember why, but I think it is something about the acid and moisture.
In general, freshly baked bread is much tastier and more filling than pre-sliced bread, which is one of the reasons it is healthier: I can easily eat half a loaf of sliced bread, but 2-3 slices of a freshly baked bread satiate me in the best possible way. Also, I have never met a sliced wheat bread that doesn't contain sugar. I think sugar is necessary for the industrial process.
As a thought example, if you bake a sandwich-style yeasted bread from scratch, with or without wholegrain flour but without preservatives or emulsifiers, it will start going stale within 12 hours of coming out of the oven. Then you can still use it for toast the next 2-3 days if kept in a plastic bag. But after that, you want to let it go stale (dry) outside of the bag deliberately, so mold doesn't develop, and you can use it for making breadcrumbs and croutons or bread salads like the panzanella mentioned by warriorqueen. Breadcrumbs and croutons have a long shelf life, but if they have a high fat content, they can go rancid. So keep in a sealed jar in a dark place. I'm just using sandwich bread as an example, there are variations among bread types, with whole rye sourdough being the most durable and baguettes probably the least, though sourdough versions last longer than yeast-based bread. There is a reason the French traditionally buy bread twice a day.
Supermarket in-store bakers usually use baking mixes that are only slightly better than the sliced bread you can find in the bread aisle, but if you have a reputable baker in your neighborhood, what you can do is slice up the whole bread when you come home, and freeze what you don't need in smaller bags. This frozen home-sliced bread lasts for ever and is as healthy and almost as tasty as freshly-baked bread. It's best as toast, though.
Taste is a complicated issue. I do love a classic white sliced bread, not least because it was one of the things I really enjoyed as a child in England. Today 99% of the time, if I eat it, I bake it myself, but the reality is that it doesn't taste like the supermarket version, so once or twice a year I buy half a loaf and make those nostalgic egg or coronation chicken sandwiches I crave. But they are not healthy at all and I can actually feel it. My blood sugar rises, I get candida issues and often also skin stuff.
But I also really like whole grain sourdough breads and they are much better for me. A local baker, who does the slicing thing, makes a white sourdough bread that is excellent for those foods where whole grain is overpowering, like a shrimp sandwich. They make the same in a whole grain version too.
And as said above, whole grain rye without additives, sliced or not, can be bought in many places and is both healthy, tasty and durable. IMO German and Danish styles are the best, but YMMV. NYC Jewish deli style rye with caraway seed is very delicious but doesn't keep as well so you have to use the freezer method.
You didn't ask about this, but finally I will recommend learning to bake your own bread. You save a lot of money and can control what is in your bread which is important because good quality baker's bread is expensive. I have baked for more than 40 years and it has been a process. I still haven't mastered rye bread. But today there are YouTubers and lots of online information that make it far easier to learn to bake than it was when I started. A sandwich/pullman bread can be mastered after a few tries by almost anyone.
On the other hand, even though good bread is costly compared to supermarket bread, it's like with dried pasta or canned tomatoes: even the very expensive breads (or pasta or tomatoes) are cheap food compared with beef or seafood.
posted by mumimor at 5:21 AM on August 11 [10 favorites]
If we’re getting our inner bread fanning on, I use a breadmaker, an expensive one although because we’re a family of 5 it is totally worth it financially and every other way. So each loaf of bread takes me maybe 10 minutes to start.
posted by warriorqueen at 5:57 AM on August 11
posted by warriorqueen at 5:57 AM on August 11
Bread is easiest to slice at the point when its crust is hardest because it is recently out of the oven, but when the interior has fully cooled so it is also at its hardest. The softer the bread the more it collapses when you try to cut it, which means there is a significant advantage to pre-slicing bread - you can cut it at the point when it is easiest to do without crushing it, or having to cut slices thicker than you might prefer. But of course once you cut your bread all those exposed surfaces are going to start absorbing the relative humidity and increase the rate at which it goes stale.
Bread is normally cut with a serrated knife - which means that even though you want the sharpest possible knife, you are also likely to have a pig of a time sharpening the knife, where it turns into a task where you file each tooth on the blade separately with a file...
If you live in a very dry environment, your bread will go harder more quickly and remain easier to cut. The density of the loaf is really important. If you have a loaf that is packed with seeds and coarse flour so that it has a more cake like texture, it will be much more easy to slice, as opposed to if you want to cut a light airy white flour loaf. White bread is going to be the hardest to cut. Every try to cut a croissant? You can render it as flat as the unbaked dough in the process.
This is why baguettes are normally so long and thin - if they have absorbed any moisture they collapse on you the moment you poke them with a blade, but with a baguette you cut a quite thick piece to get a reasonable portion, so it makes it far easier. The thinness of the loaf protects you from the bread going soft, and you can break your bread instead of slicing it. Of course in baguette culture you buy your bread fresh every single day. And you probably have all kinds of traditional recipes to deal with using up stale bread, from French toast dredged in eggs and milk and fried, to French onion soup, to croutons.
Historically Europe and the areas around the Mediterranean had bread as their primary staple; "Give us this day, our daily bread..." The expression "meat and drink" hearkens back to a time when meat just meant food. The word used for meat was flesh. The bread of the past was very, very different from the bread of the modern era. There were many, many grades and types of bread, from Manchet, which was a loaf of bread made from sifted wheat flour, to horse bread which was made with a mixture of beans or peas and bran. The word lady comes from the word hlaf, the Old English word for bread, which also evolved into the word loaf. The lady was the loaf-maiden, the woman who kneaded the bread; it has been speculated that she was the lady because she had the clean hands required to knead bread, and the high rank to create a loaf of flour fine enough that it could be kneaded and raised. You don't knead bread made out of a mixture of semi sprouted grain and bean meal.
Flour in Medieval times was often made from mixed grain - oats and rye were grown together as were barley and wheat. Once the grains became mixed it was extremely hard to separate them, and there was a big advantage to mixed grains. In a good year the wheat would flourish and crowd out the barley, and the harvest would be bigger overall because wheat produces more crop per acre than barley can. In a bad year, barley, being hardier would flourish and you'd get enough of a crop to get by, even when the wheat crop failed so badly you would face starvation. This was one of the many ways the subsistence agriculture of time hedged against wet years, and dry years, and rusts, and ergot, and pests.
Very often the grain was milled soon after it had dried sufficiently. This would prevent it from sprouting if it got exposed to humidity. But then the flour itself was also subject to spoiling as whole flour with the germ oil in it can go rancid, or trickling away if the mice got into it, or turning into a horrible hard rotting rock if water got into it, that would be very difficult to resuscitate enough to keep the family from starving. So the flour was commonly baked into bread and put into sacks to be stored, and hung from the rafters where it would dry out fast if the weather got humid. Sacks were better than baskets, as you could easily see rodents moving in the bags, and detect where bread dust was coming from if something was up there eating your stored bread.
The bread itself was naturally extremely hard. It was closer to hardtack or crackers than modern bread and it was commonly dunked into broth or served with pottage. You may have heard of people dipping the host wafer into the wine. The practice comes from your staple food being so hard on the teeth, and so hard that it would scrape the roof of your mouth into ribbons. Living on dry bread was a penance indeed. You had to suck it very slowly and carefully.
Loaves of bread often were somewhat burnt on the outside as the process of baking them on a hearth or in a brick or stone oven inside the chamber that had previously held the fire meant that they had a blackened exterior and resembled rocks. They were often baked in single serving sizes and were quite flat - they were used as plates, called trenchers. A mass of soft savoury wet stew, or soup, or just plain boiled turnip could be dumped on top of them and it would soften the bread enough that you could eat it. The very bottom crust would be the most burnt and the hardest part which got left behind unless you were very hungry. Those who ate only the upper crust, were the highest status, thus our term 'the upper crust'. In large households at the end of the meal, someone appointed to the role of the almoner would go around and gather up the uneaten lower crusts and they would be distributed, as alms to the indigent who would gather at the gate outside to await them at the end of meals. In ordinary households the crusts went to feed the family pig. In northern Europe you were poor indeed if you didn't raise at least one piglet a year to slaughter in the fall, yet there were hundreds and thousands of paupers, "living on his poor crust".
So back to advantages of slicing your bread as you need it. You can make a bread bowl out of it. You can choose your serving sizes and shapes as long as you will have to do a lot of planning around when and how to eat it. You will be able to get away from commercial ultra processed bread with all kinds of additives. You'll very likely end up adding good ingredients to your diet, as you experiment with breads that are easier to cut, because you start to pick breads that have whole grains and the germ of the grain and seeds and other ingredients in them, such as egg, or milk or pea flour. It will almost certainly end up being lower in gluten as you get frustrated with soft highly raised bread collapsing on you and switch to something more resilient. Modern mass produced bread is considered ultra-processed, but it is such a staple for so many people and such a useful convenience food, that many dietitians give it a pass when coaching people on how to eat more healthily and how to avoid ultra processed food. That doesn't change the fact that pre-sliced commercial bread often contains some pretty alarming additives - at one point a few years ago it often had an additive called aziodicarbonamide, which was also used to add lightness and lift to yoga mats
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:08 AM on August 11 [30 favorites]
Bread is normally cut with a serrated knife - which means that even though you want the sharpest possible knife, you are also likely to have a pig of a time sharpening the knife, where it turns into a task where you file each tooth on the blade separately with a file...
If you live in a very dry environment, your bread will go harder more quickly and remain easier to cut. The density of the loaf is really important. If you have a loaf that is packed with seeds and coarse flour so that it has a more cake like texture, it will be much more easy to slice, as opposed to if you want to cut a light airy white flour loaf. White bread is going to be the hardest to cut. Every try to cut a croissant? You can render it as flat as the unbaked dough in the process.
This is why baguettes are normally so long and thin - if they have absorbed any moisture they collapse on you the moment you poke them with a blade, but with a baguette you cut a quite thick piece to get a reasonable portion, so it makes it far easier. The thinness of the loaf protects you from the bread going soft, and you can break your bread instead of slicing it. Of course in baguette culture you buy your bread fresh every single day. And you probably have all kinds of traditional recipes to deal with using up stale bread, from French toast dredged in eggs and milk and fried, to French onion soup, to croutons.
Historically Europe and the areas around the Mediterranean had bread as their primary staple; "Give us this day, our daily bread..." The expression "meat and drink" hearkens back to a time when meat just meant food. The word used for meat was flesh. The bread of the past was very, very different from the bread of the modern era. There were many, many grades and types of bread, from Manchet, which was a loaf of bread made from sifted wheat flour, to horse bread which was made with a mixture of beans or peas and bran. The word lady comes from the word hlaf, the Old English word for bread, which also evolved into the word loaf. The lady was the loaf-maiden, the woman who kneaded the bread; it has been speculated that she was the lady because she had the clean hands required to knead bread, and the high rank to create a loaf of flour fine enough that it could be kneaded and raised. You don't knead bread made out of a mixture of semi sprouted grain and bean meal.
Flour in Medieval times was often made from mixed grain - oats and rye were grown together as were barley and wheat. Once the grains became mixed it was extremely hard to separate them, and there was a big advantage to mixed grains. In a good year the wheat would flourish and crowd out the barley, and the harvest would be bigger overall because wheat produces more crop per acre than barley can. In a bad year, barley, being hardier would flourish and you'd get enough of a crop to get by, even when the wheat crop failed so badly you would face starvation. This was one of the many ways the subsistence agriculture of time hedged against wet years, and dry years, and rusts, and ergot, and pests.
Very often the grain was milled soon after it had dried sufficiently. This would prevent it from sprouting if it got exposed to humidity. But then the flour itself was also subject to spoiling as whole flour with the germ oil in it can go rancid, or trickling away if the mice got into it, or turning into a horrible hard rotting rock if water got into it, that would be very difficult to resuscitate enough to keep the family from starving. So the flour was commonly baked into bread and put into sacks to be stored, and hung from the rafters where it would dry out fast if the weather got humid. Sacks were better than baskets, as you could easily see rodents moving in the bags, and detect where bread dust was coming from if something was up there eating your stored bread.
The bread itself was naturally extremely hard. It was closer to hardtack or crackers than modern bread and it was commonly dunked into broth or served with pottage. You may have heard of people dipping the host wafer into the wine. The practice comes from your staple food being so hard on the teeth, and so hard that it would scrape the roof of your mouth into ribbons. Living on dry bread was a penance indeed. You had to suck it very slowly and carefully.
Loaves of bread often were somewhat burnt on the outside as the process of baking them on a hearth or in a brick or stone oven inside the chamber that had previously held the fire meant that they had a blackened exterior and resembled rocks. They were often baked in single serving sizes and were quite flat - they were used as plates, called trenchers. A mass of soft savoury wet stew, or soup, or just plain boiled turnip could be dumped on top of them and it would soften the bread enough that you could eat it. The very bottom crust would be the most burnt and the hardest part which got left behind unless you were very hungry. Those who ate only the upper crust, were the highest status, thus our term 'the upper crust'. In large households at the end of the meal, someone appointed to the role of the almoner would go around and gather up the uneaten lower crusts and they would be distributed, as alms to the indigent who would gather at the gate outside to await them at the end of meals. In ordinary households the crusts went to feed the family pig. In northern Europe you were poor indeed if you didn't raise at least one piglet a year to slaughter in the fall, yet there were hundreds and thousands of paupers, "living on his poor crust".
So back to advantages of slicing your bread as you need it. You can make a bread bowl out of it. You can choose your serving sizes and shapes as long as you will have to do a lot of planning around when and how to eat it. You will be able to get away from commercial ultra processed bread with all kinds of additives. You'll very likely end up adding good ingredients to your diet, as you experiment with breads that are easier to cut, because you start to pick breads that have whole grains and the germ of the grain and seeds and other ingredients in them, such as egg, or milk or pea flour. It will almost certainly end up being lower in gluten as you get frustrated with soft highly raised bread collapsing on you and switch to something more resilient. Modern mass produced bread is considered ultra-processed, but it is such a staple for so many people and such a useful convenience food, that many dietitians give it a pass when coaching people on how to eat more healthily and how to avoid ultra processed food. That doesn't change the fact that pre-sliced commercial bread often contains some pretty alarming additives - at one point a few years ago it often had an additive called aziodicarbonamide, which was also used to add lightness and lift to yoga mats
posted by Jane the Brown at 6:08 AM on August 11 [30 favorites]
I only use bread to make toast. Hence, my loaves live in the freezer. Since IMO French bread makes the best toast, and the only acceptable French bread within my shopping radius is at Sprouts, unsliced; I slice my own, several minutes out of the freezer, from both ends. Then the rest of the loaf goes back into the freezer.
posted by Rash at 9:25 AM on August 11 [1 favorite]
posted by Rash at 9:25 AM on August 11 [1 favorite]
If you go to a good bakery, the bread will taste better, but it won’t last as long because it won’t have all the preservatives.
Depending on your weather, you might have to slice the loaf and freeze it after the first day.
posted by betweenthebars at 9:54 AM on August 11 [1 favorite]
Depending on your weather, you might have to slice the loaf and freeze it after the first day.
posted by betweenthebars at 9:54 AM on August 11 [1 favorite]
Before I started making bread (with this recipe ... first google link for "easiest bread"), I would buy the best loaf on offer at the grocery store unsliced, then slice it thickly when I got home, and freeze the slices.
posted by pjenks at 10:46 AM on August 11
posted by pjenks at 10:46 AM on August 11
I forgot something above: Swedish or Finnish crisp rye bread is shelf-stable and at least where I live has no additives. The same with Sardinian Pane Carasau. These breads are all made to last all winter for shepherds or other people who don't have access to grains during winter. There are similar types of bread many places in the world, these are just the ones I know about.
In periods when I haven't had the spoons for baking or the money for good fresh bread, these have been my staples. Super healthy, tasty and easy to deal with. And crunchy in the best way.
You can also make something like lasagne from them, but I'm not sure I know that is a good thing; my mother was a terrible cook and some things she she made might have been better if made by a better cook.
After reading Jane The Brown's great comment, I'd like to add that stove-top breads have probably always been a thing, long before ovens were invented. So flatbreads, pancakes, pakoras, tortillas and a lot of other delicious things made of dough and baked over a fire are great for making bread fast from scratch. I do it regularly because I live alone and sometimes need fresh bread while it doesn't make sense to bake a whole loaf.
posted by mumimor at 1:00 PM on August 11
In periods when I haven't had the spoons for baking or the money for good fresh bread, these have been my staples. Super healthy, tasty and easy to deal with. And crunchy in the best way.
You can also make something like lasagne from them, but I'm not sure I know that is a good thing; my mother was a terrible cook and some things she she made might have been better if made by a better cook.
After reading Jane The Brown's great comment, I'd like to add that stove-top breads have probably always been a thing, long before ovens were invented. So flatbreads, pancakes, pakoras, tortillas and a lot of other delicious things made of dough and baked over a fire are great for making bread fast from scratch. I do it regularly because I live alone and sometimes need fresh bread while it doesn't make sense to bake a whole loaf.
posted by mumimor at 1:00 PM on August 11
In my world, sliced vs unsliced means packaged mass market bread vs a fresh baked loaf. So, if you’re comparing processed supermarket bread, which to my taste is gross and too soft and squishy and flavorless except for sweet-chemically-plasticky, to a fresh baked loaf of anything, the fresh will always taste better because it tastes like a baked good and not a plastic bag. However the advantage of presliced imo is you can pop it in the freezer and the toaster conveniently, and it doesn’t mold or dry out as fast as fresh.
Now that I write it up I see that I understand these items as totally separate products with different purposes.
posted by kapers at 1:18 PM on August 11 [4 favorites]
Now that I write it up I see that I understand these items as totally separate products with different purposes.
posted by kapers at 1:18 PM on August 11 [4 favorites]
Like kapers, I think of sliced vs unsliced bread as essentially different products. I don't know all of the details of commercial baking, but sliced breads, even sliced sourdoughs and ryes, have a very different texture to me than unsliced breads. The unsliced breads tend to go stale in a way that makes good croutons, the sliced breads tend to maybe last a little longer in a usable form, but I don't enjoy them nearly as much.
posted by straw at 8:22 PM on August 11
posted by straw at 8:22 PM on August 11
I've never found any broad real advantage either way. It seems to depend on the kind of bread, really. I'm a bread snob, and buy sliced and unsliced breads depending on what with and how they're going to be eaten. There are some applications where only mass produced Wonder-type bread will do (I actually haven't bought Wonder in decades, usually I get Bimbo). I find the unsliced breads I buy are better torn than sliced, given the way I consume them.
posted by 2N2222 at 11:46 PM on August 11
posted by 2N2222 at 11:46 PM on August 11
Mod note: [Hello, breadheads! Dough not doubt that this post has been added to the sidebread and the Bread Of blog!]
posted by taz (staff) at 1:35 AM on August 13 [1 favorite]
posted by taz (staff) at 1:35 AM on August 13 [1 favorite]
Fresh bread freezes really easily and well, and is so much tastier. My suggestion is to have the bakery slice it, then put half in the fridge and half in the freezer if you won't use a loaf quickly.
Advanced bread hack: put pieces of parchment paper between the slices you're freezing so they don't stick together.
This gives me a week or two's supply of delicious bread that won't go stale or moldy before I use it, and keeps me from having to slice frozen bread. And you can easily pop a frozen slice in the toaster; it comes out perfect.
posted by mediareport at 7:42 AM on August 13
Advanced bread hack: put pieces of parchment paper between the slices you're freezing so they don't stick together.
This gives me a week or two's supply of delicious bread that won't go stale or moldy before I use it, and keeps me from having to slice frozen bread. And you can easily pop a frozen slice in the toaster; it comes out perfect.
posted by mediareport at 7:42 AM on August 13
The same loaf of bread will last slightly longer unsliced than sliced. Each slice adds surface area exposed to outside air which can make it get stale sooner or grow mold faster. This effect is pretty small if you store the slices pushed together in a bag, but it's not nothing.
Fancy bakeries generally sell unsliced bread. But some of them have slicers in the store so it's the same bread sliced for your convenience. I find it very difficult to make even square slices freehanding it so sometimes I have them slice it for me.
posted by Nelson at 6:02 PM on August 16
Fancy bakeries generally sell unsliced bread. But some of them have slicers in the store so it's the same bread sliced for your convenience. I find it very difficult to make even square slices freehanding it so sometimes I have them slice it for me.
posted by Nelson at 6:02 PM on August 16
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posted by rongorongo at 3:02 AM on August 11 [3 favorites]