Cooking with Rita

Whatever happened to bread boxes?

My mother-in-law, a frugal German woman, always had a bread box filled with bread on her counter. She never stored bread in the frig. After she passed away, I don’t know what happened to it, but wish I had gotten it.  Especially now that I bake a lot of my own breads or buy natural Artisan bread from the grocery.

So why would one want a breadbox and are they necessary?  Apparently so, since now many stores are carrying breadboxes. Here’s the “why’s” with some history of the breadbox:

A breadbox  is a container for storing bread and other baked goods to keep them fresh. They were a more common household kitchen item until bread started being made commercially with food preservatives and wrapped in plastic bags.



Breadboxes are most commonly big enough to fit one or two average size loaves of bread.

What breadboxes do:

  • Keep their contents at room temperature, prolonging edible storage time.
  • Have a lid loose enough to allow airflow, reducing condensation and moisture and that helps prevent mold.

Bread stays fresher in breadboxes than in the frig:

Bread does not go stale  by “drying out”—stale “dry” bread weighs the same as moist “fresh” bread, indicating almost no loss of water.

Bread goes stale  through a process in which the starch transposes to a crystalline form in the presence of the water contained within the bread itself. The process speeds up at cooler temperatures like in the frig, so that’s why bread stored at room temperature remains fresher for longer periods than refrigerated bread

What about the freezer?

Frozen bread, however, traps the moisture as ice, and prevents the staling process.

A nice slice of homemade bread


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