How to Keep Bread Crust Soft When Baking

Making your own bread at home is a great way to make a healthy loaf. For novice bread bakers, understanding how all of the bread ingredients combine to create a loaf is important to the final product's quality. A few simple recipe adjustments or additions will do the trick to form a softer bread crust. These ingredients are commonly used in traditional, quick and sweet bread recipes. Bake a few trial loaves after adjusting the ingredients in a good bread recipe until the results are desirable.

Things You'll Need

• Water
• Milk, liquid, evaporated or powdered
• Fat
• Eggs
• Celery stalk

Instructions

1. Increase the amount of water available to the bread dough during the baking process. Water, in the form of steam, helps to create a softer bread crust. Extra water can be added to the baking oven during the baking process by adding a small pan of water to a lower baking rack, spraying water into the hot oven during baking, adding flat terra cotta tiles to the bottom oven rack, and by adding ice cubes to the oven in a glass or ceramic bowl.

2. Use milk as the liquid in the recipe instead of water. Milk can also be added in the evaporated or the powdered form for the same results.

3. Add more fat to the bread recipe. Fat is added to bread recipes in the form of butter, shortening, oil, margarine or lard. Fat lubricates the gluten in the flour and makes the gluten strands break easier. This action softens the bread, the crust included. Fat also adds flavor to the bread loaf.

4. Add an egg or two to the bread recipe. In addition to softening the baked crust, an egg will also add color and flavor.

5. Add a stalk of clean celery to the plastic bag in which the bread is stored. Place the bread in a refrigerator to keep it mold free for more than a week.

References

• Recipe Tips: "Bread Baking Guide"
• New Mexico State University: "Baking Bread the Modern Way"
• Kitchen Hints and Tips: "Keeping Home Baked Bread Fresh"