Rehydrate your sourdough
It isn’t stale, it’s dry.
Dry bread is a solved problem — heat and a little water fix it.
- Day three onward
- Run the cut face briefly under the tap and put the loaf in a 375° oven for ten minutes. It comes back.
- The crust went soft
- Five minutes in a hot oven, straight on the rack. Crusts recover far better than people expect.
- From the freezer
- Toast slices straight from frozen — no thawing.
One more thing
Why it goes hard instead of going off.
Supermarket bread stays soft for a fortnight because calcium propionate holds mold off and a stack of emulsifiers keeps the crumb pliable. Ours has neither, so it does what bread has always done: it dries out.
Bread engineered never to dry out is a different thing altogether, and that’s the trade we’re not willing to make.
