Cryostasis requires a transaction with the devil in exchange for economies of scale.

How long your homemade bread can be frozen depends on how well you negotiate this unholy contract. There are three ways to go about it: one that will get you a good job review, one that will get you a promotion, and one that will require penance. Read on for some instructions, explanations, and tips.

1. Once your freshly-baked loaves have come to complete and utter, stone-cold room temperature, wrap the ones you want to freeze in plastic wrap, and then in foil. Nice’n tight. They’ll be good for three to four months or more in frozen lockup, without freezer burn. 2. If you’re bucking for a promotion and you have a vacuum sealer, you can keep your bread fresh longer: after your plastic-and-foil-wrapped bread has been in the freezer for two hours, you can vacuum seal it. Use a low setting and be sure to seal the bread before the machine begins to even slightly crush your loaf. Put it back in the freezer and you can leave it there for a year. FoodSaver says it’s good for up to  three years, but I’ve never actually tried that. 3. If you don’t have a vacuum sealer, but you do have a good bit of mojo, you can keep your bread even fresher, even longer: put the plastic-and-foil-wrapped loaves in a re-sealable bag and suck the air out with a hand-rolled straw made of a page ripped from a King James version of The Bible, then draw a hex sign on the bag as you chant “passus et sepultus est, et resurrexit tertia die” with your eyes closed. Writing a hex sign with your eyes closed takes practice. Not everyone can do that, I know.

Before you start freezing loaves of bread, you should know that they can be used as weapons.

This post tells you how to get your bread in the freezer, and how long you can leave it there. To find out how to take it out, click here.

It’s rare that I want to banish a loaf to the freezer for months. In fact, mine don’t normally spend more than a few weeks there. So, I generally consider Method 1 (above) to be the best way to freeze bread. But how do we find ourselves in the position of having to freeze bread in the first place? Why not just bake one loaf at a time? Like many bread recipes, miLam’s 8-Grain White, Olive, and Nut’n Onion recipes produce two loaves. You may have a crew to feed, so two loaves might be fine for you.  But if you’re more of a one-loaf-at-a-time guy, you should know that a lot of good can come from making two loaves. True, there are no savings in material costs, but savings in production have never been higher! If you were to take a typical two-loaf recipe, divide the ingredients in half, and make two loaves one at a time, it would require twice as much work. In addition to your time and effort in prep, the oven would have to be on twice as long and you would have twice as much clean up. Do you really want to clean up the kitchen twice? No. Of course you don’t.

No.

Of course you don’t

Freeze that second loaf, if one is enough for you. A week or a fortnight from now, you’ll take it from the freezer and find yourself enjoying it with all the fuss it took to make it far behind and forgotten. Or how about this: a few minutes after finishing your shift at the factory, you’ll show up at a friend’s dinner party with a fresh, fabulous loaf of bread. They’ll think you’re some kind of a freaking Time Lord. “When did you have time to bake this?” they’ll try to ask with their mouths full, as they find they can’t fill their faces fast enough with your flavorsome focaccia. If you’re firmly confident that both those scenarios are doubtful, then walk the second loaf down to your neighbor. They’ll be flabbergasted and gratified, and maybe you’ll find that the next time you’re knee fucking deep in two feet snow with a busted shovel, that neighbor’s going to be there for you.

Freeze Your Bread,
Not Your Beard

Freezing bread can be dangerous
if you’re dyslexic

A dark side, however, the freezer does have. The freezer will exact a price on your bread. Like a trickster demon, it will tempt you with perfect preservation – a seemingly eternal youth. But it will only keep this promise while the bread remains inside. Upon emerging from its enchanted sleep, your bread will wake to find itself aging twice as fast as normal bread, and nothing in heaven or on earth can break this curse. Oh, it’ll be absolutely delicious. At first. In fact, give it a brief oven heating and you’ll swear it’s a fresh loaf! But in about two days, you’ll have no choice but to put any of it that’s left out of it’s misery.

However, there is a way to cheat the devil: use a two-loaf recipe to make one large and two small loaves. You can eat the larger one over the next several days, while storing the other two in the freezer. They may have only two days of life when they come out, but you’ll only need two days to eat them (or three or four days to finish them off as toast). When it comes down to shaping the final loaves of a two-loaf recipe, divide the dough in half, as instructed. But as you do, stand on your left foot, facing west, and chant “panem nostrum cotidianum da nobis hodie.” That will confuse the devil, and while he’s looking the other way, split one of those halves of dough in half again. You’ll now have one loaf that will fit into a standard-size bread pan, and two smaller loaves that will fit into pans with a 3-cup capacity.^[1] All three loaves will rise in the same amount of time and will bake in the oven together, for about the same amount of time: it’s a mystery, but it’s true. The smaller ones might come out a couple of minutes earlier, but if so, not much.

8-Grain White Bread

Nut’n Onion Bread

How Long Can You Keep Frozen Bread? MiLam says a year with a saver, four months without. Next, I suppose you’ll want to know how to thaw it.

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Notes

Credits for all images on this page: hover over image and/or green caption text. Click to jump to source.

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