I live in a humid climate (especially in the summer), and if we don’t refrigerate our bread and tortillas, or any baked goods, they get moldy in like 4 days.
Batteries
Refrigerating bread slows down mold growth…
This increasing the shelf life.
You don’t have to refrigerate bread. But you can with clear reason.
Mine refuse to refrigerate cheese (other than cream-cheese) and butter. Infuriates me as it gets super oily and rancid real fast.
One of my wife’s friends got persistently sick last year. She just could not get better. Sometimes she’d be fine for a week or two, but then she’d get sick again. Eventually it came down to her needing to document everything she did each day - and they discovered she was getting sick from warm butter.
Turns out her mom had come over at some point and saw that she refrigerated butter and said “you don’t need to do that, it’s so much easier to use when warm and it doesn’t go bad.” Yeah, that’s the case if you eat a stick of butter in a few short days. But you can’t leave it out for more than that or it starts getting filled with all sorts of germs.
Bread absolutely lasts longer when refrigerated
Living in the tropics, it’s rather common to refrigerate bread, else you run the risk of mould overnight.
Peanut butter does NOT go in the fridge. 🤬
deleted by creator
My father taught me to put LSD bloaters in the fridge.
Wait you guys don’t refrigerate your bread?
Putting boiling water in the freezer is so useful, like you can cook it once and freeze it, then get it out when you need it and just reheat it a little.
Mine didn’t refrigerate bread when I was growing up, but I do now. There are less people in the house so the bread stays around longer.
As a german this is heresy.
What Americans call “bread” doesn’t qualify as bread to Germans anyway. Kinda like beer.
We make plenty of good bread and some of the best beer in the world. We just also make some of the worst of both. Big country, tons of room in the market. (We also have excellent wine, chocolate, cheese, whatever you want. It’s just not necessarily at your local supermarket.)
Bread outside the fridge spoils fast. Bread in the fridge lasts longer but is less fluffy. In this household we refrigerate our bread and then toast it lightly if we’re going to eat it straight. Most of the sandwiches I make are toasted anyway.
If I don’t put my bread in the fridge, it’s moldy within a week. It’s all meant to be toasted anyway.
Clean your cupboards. Mold spores can remain on surfaces for months. Give everything a good wipe-down with some cleaning spray or vinegar solution and then leave the cabinets open to dry out well. And do it again anytime food gets moldy.
Packaged bread should last more than a week, but fresh bread is meant to be eaten within a few days, if not the same day.
I used to live in a desert and bread easily lasted for weeks. Once I moved to what is essentially a rain forest, it doesn’t last more than 5 days. I have to refrigerate it.
Yes, you’re right about the humidity being the biggest factor, and that will also make bread go stale. It also depends on whether it’s prepackaged bread or freshly baked. Prepackaged bread is less likely to arrive with mold spores, and the packaging keeps humidity out during transit and storage. Once it is opened to the humidity, especially in tropical climates, refrigeration will slow any growth.
For people in arid climates, their refrigerator might actually be more humid than their cupboards.
Humidity is an interesting metric. It’s a percentage of the airs total capacity to absorb moisture.
It’s not a measure of percentage of water(vapour?) in the air.
Air can have 100% humidity. It can’t have 100% water
I’ve lived on my own for a while and I freeze everything I can. Nothing lasts long enough unless it’s frozen or shelf safe.
This does mean I get a lot of my fruits in smoothie form.
I’m lucky most vegan things last longer than the non-vegan things I grew up with.
I’m vegan too, and God bless how long our food lasts.
Apparently some people refrigerate butter
