Why Amish Bread Never Goes Moldy (Stop Buying a Loaf Every Week)

My name is Darlene Hollis. I cooked in a school kitchen for thirty-five years, baking rolls for four hundred children at a time on a budget somebody in an office set for us, and when bread is that much of your food money you learn fast that you cannot afford to feed the trash can. You buy a loaf on Saturday. By Thursday there is a spot of blue-green fuzz on the heel and eleven good slices going in the bag with it, knotted up so you don't have to smell it again. You did nothing wrong. You put it where everybody puts it. And it turned anyway, for the third time this month. Here is the part most folks have backwards. Amish bread does not keep because of something in it. There is no old recipe and no secret ingredient. It keeps because it never gets the chance to mold. Your problem is not a bread problem. It is a storage problem. A warm loaf sealed in plastic makes its own rain, and mold spores are already in the air of every kitchen in this country, waiting on a wet spot and a warm day. My mother Ada said bread sweats, and you never bag a sweating loaf. And the refrigerator is not the answer either. Starch firms back up fastest at refrigerator temperature. Just above freezing is the worst place a loaf can sit. The freezer stops the whole business cold. So you split the loaf. Half stays out in a bread box or its bag folded over loose, somewhere cool and away from the stove. The other half goes sliced into a freezer bag, air pressed out, dated in marker. A box of freezer bags ran me about a dollar and a half. A loaf runs about three dollars, and the waste runs about fifty-two dollars a year. In this video I show you why the Amish loaf keeps, why plastic on a warm counter is a greenhouse, what starch retrogradation actually means, how to split a loaf in two minutes on shopping day, what to do in August when the kitchen is damp, how to bring stale bread back in a 350-degree oven, and what the lumpy bag in my freezer door has been paying for since 1917. I also tell you where it falls short. This keeps mold from starting. It will not rescue a loaf that has already turned. WHAT YOU WILL NEED A loaf of bread, about $3 A box of freezer bags, about $1.50 A permanent marker for dating the bag A bread box, or the bag the loaf came in A wire rack, if you bake your own A spare bag for heels and ends, costs nothing A WORD OF CAUTION Bread past about three months in the freezer starts drying out and picking up freezer taste, so date the bag and eat it, do not hoard it. And hear this plain. If a loaf has already molded, even one spot, the whole soft loaf goes in the trash. Do not cut around it. Mold runs threads down through soft bread far past what your eye can see, and no slice in that bag is worth a bad stomach. Subscribe if you want the old kitchen ways put back in plain words, the way they were taught county by county before anybody quit teaching them. #amish #breadstorage #frugalliving