I learned a new cooking trick today. I probably heard about it from somewhere since I was pretty sure it would work before I tried it, but it was very effective.
I buy these little bread thingies. I don’t think they’re proper baguettes though, since they’re very thin. They’re the length of a good-sized baguette (somewhere around two feet long), but only about an inch and a half in diameter. Anyway, I buy them every so often along with a block of cheese (munster or cheddar or something) for snacking.
Last time I did this, I got a very large block of munster (since it was on sale), and got extra bread so I wouldn’t have to buy more bread to finish the cheese. This extra bread I stored in the freezer (since bread lasts pretty much indefinitely when vacuum sealed and frozen), but I didn’t realize at the time that the bag it was in was less than air-tight.
When I came back a week later, my bread was nearly rock-solid. It was already a tough bread (French, in this case) and all the moisture was leeched out in the cold. This makes the bread unfortunately unsuitable for human consumption.
So I took a cup, filled it with water, and broke off a piece of bread longer than the diameter of the cup. I lay the bread across the rim of the cup (suspending it over the water) and put the whole thing in the microwave for one minute. I don’t know how much of the effect was due to the relatively high porous-ness of French bread, but it softened right up. The heat and steam from the microwaved water leeched into the bread.
This is pretty interesting since it implies that I can control just how soft (or hard) the bread is by leaving it under steam for longer or shorter periods of time. I’m trying to figure out what cool cooking stuff I can do with this trick, but so far nothing’s come to mind…
Thomas