Hollywood is not wrong that moisture loss is bad for bread, it’s not the primary reason to avoid refrigerating bread. The science: Refrigeration speeds up the starches’ return to a more organized crystalline structure (also known as retrogradation), which means it hardens (i.e. stales) far faster.
Unrefrigerated bread does typically get moldy faster. The trade-off is longevity over texture, and many consumers are more concerned with stretching their bread (and their metaphorical bread) as far as possible, especially these days.
To which we say, fair. And also: freeze! Becky wrote a helpful guide to storing bread in that other section of your favorite appliance. She says the freezer “serves as a kind of pause button, meaning fresh bread you move into cold storage can come out almost as good as the day you put it in.”
Serious Eats also covered the issue to the same conclusion a while ago: https://www.seriouseats.com/does-refrigeration-really-ruin-bread
@memfree I’m keeping my bread in the fridge, but in the bag I bought it in. This way, water has no place to evaporate to.
– but moisture isn’t the problem. From Serious Eats:
@memfree I see. I never had this problem fwiw
your fridge bread stales quicker than it would in room temperature, that’s just a fact.
Depends. The problem with room temperature is mold. So in that case fridge is just mostly fine. Sure if your keeping it a long time freeze.
@FiskFisk33 never had this problem. Probably because I got used to eat anything with bread, so bread gets finished in a few days.