Better Living Through Chemistry

So my challah experiment has run into a minor speedbump.

Yes, the ugly spectre of food spoilage has descended upon my kitchen. The bread lasted a good solid week on my counter before these microscopic interlopers showed up, so it didn't do too bad, but the bread was clearly lacking the extra natural preservative qualities of the cakes I had previously been baking. All that extra sugar really does do wonders to suck the life out of microbes.

So, I plucked this little blue speck of fouling from the loaf and ensconced the remainder in the refrigerator. This is a risky move; not necessarily from a food safety perspective, but rather from a freshness and palatability one.

You see, as soon as bread is done baking, the starches within begin a process of retrogradation. They try to revert from their soft, fluffy cooked form into a hard, chewy crystalline form. This process happens rather slowly at counter temperature, but gets absolutely turbocharged at refrigeration temperature. This is the same process that turns leftover rice into buckshot and day-old mashed potatoes into half-set drywall compound.

Luckily there is one sure fire way to reverse this process: cook the starch again.

The good news here is that challah toast is really quite tasty, even if it wasn't exactly what I had initially signed up for. Tasty or not, though, it does leave me with a puzzle for what to do with the next batch of bread to avoid this tragedy recurring.

Thankfully, science has an answer in the form of calcium propionate, which is mixed into the dough at a ratio of approximately 0.1% of the flour weight, or about a quarter teaspoon for the 2-loaf recipe I'm making.

I may have obtained a lifetime supply of it. Also it does amuse me that a concentrated food preservative has a best-by date. Something tells me that's more of a liability thing than an actual risk of spoilage.

Will it work, though? Only time will tell.