Have you found that your home made bread just doesn’t stay fresh as long as the loaves you buy from the store?

It is typical for home made bread to stale faster than the store bought stuff.  Commercially produced breads have many shelf life extenders added to them to keep them nice until the end of the week.  These chemicals have all kinds of chemical and trademarked product names to go into, but if your bread is still soft a week after you bought it, at least a couple of them are in there.

A home baker probably couldn’t easily get their hands on them even if they wanted to, but there is one additive you you might want to use when baking  your bread.

Lecithin is an extremely common and very useful substance derived from soy and found in egg yolks.  It is an emulsifier, which is a substance that allows fat and water to mix.  In a chocolate bar, lecithin keeps the cocoa butter and solids together.  It is also what allows oil and water to mix when making mayonnaise.

Adding it to bread will keep the fats in a stable emulsion with water and keep the moisture in the crumb of the bread, thus postponing the staling.  Lecithin is also a surfactant and lubricant, so it will make the dough easier to work, allow ingredients to disperse more easily, and relaxes the gluten for a chewier loaf.

To use lecithin to improve your bread dough (rather than buying some expensive dough improver product), use about 3/4 tablespoons of lecithin granules per cup of flour, and mix it in with the dry ingredients.  If you have liquid lecithin, 1/2 tablespoon per cup of flour, added with the moist ingredients should do the trick.

This and other molecular gastronomy ingredients are available at  Le Sanctuaire.  Lecithin can also be found at GNC, as well as other nutrition and health food shops.

If you find your newly shelf stable bread is going mouldy too fast, let it cool THOROUGHLY before packing it away in any type of airtight container.  Warm bread is still giving off small amounts of moisture, which if trapped in an airtight container will settle on  the bread and provide the perfect breeding ground for airborne spores.