Bread is an easy food to stock up on for later. Bakeries offer discounts on day-old bread and rolls; you might enjoy a bagel now and then, but don't want to have to eat one every morning, or you bake bread and want to store extra loaves for later use. Whatever the reason, the best way to store bread is with a vacuum sealer machine.
There's just one problem: bread is soft and contains air-filled chambers. If you simply throw it in a vacuum sealer bag and vacuum that air out, you'll end up with a compressed lump of dough that isn't very appetizing. So how do you prevent this? FoodVacBags has the answer.
The easiest way to safely seal your bread is to freeze it first. This will make the bread rigid enough that it won't crush when the air is vacuumed out. Simply place the bread you want to seal on a pan or other freezer-safe dish and place it in the freezer for a couple of hours. Once it has been thoroughly frozen, pull it out, place it in a vacuum seal bag, and proceed to vacuum and seal it. Freezing your bread first is a method that works with any vacuum sealer machine.
Some vacuum sealer machines will allow you to seal unfrozen bread by using a "pulse" setting. With this setting, the machine will remove only as much air as you tell it to. By controlling the amount of air removed, you can stop the vacuum process and seal the bag before the bread is crushed. The exact process varies by machine, so check your vacuum sealer's instruction booklet for more information.
No matter which method you choose, the cost savings of sealing breads, over letting them get moldy on the counter, is worth the effort.
Do you seal bread often? Which technique do you use when you are storing bread? Let us know in the comments below!