So the other thread about the old saw about breadboxes raised the question, do breadboxes keep bread fresher than if it is left on the counter in the original plastic wrapping? I can see how it might have worked years ago before current preservatives and packaging, but do they do anything more today than just give you a centralized place to keep bread?
I remember my grandmother’s breadbox was a help back in the days when the bread came in waxed paper. The plastic wrapper bread comes in today beats the breadbox hollow, except that the breadbox can keep the bread from being squashed if something falls on it.
There may be an advantage to a breadbox if you bake your own bread. I’m not really up on homemade bread, but I think in the first, say, half a day, it is venting moisture and could get nasty if wrapped in plastic. So for a new, uncut homemade loaf, a breadbox would be good.
Anyone up on homemade bread can jump in and correct me.
it lasts more than one day?
sheesh, tell mrAru and our roommates, they eat it as fast as I can make it some days=\ It is pitiful when I have to make bread to make them bread pudding [which was invented as a way to sue up stale bread=]
My mother-in-law bought me some plastic loaf-shaped breadboxes and all they did was make the bread get moldy faster, by holding in the moisture. 
I use a plastic breadbox, but keep the bread along with the original wrapping in it. Double indemnity. No problem. Even if you don’t bake your own bread (with bread machines, this has become much easier, but I gave that up years ago), you can buy freshly baked bread without preservatives at many stores. Not at the supermarkets, but there are specialty stores. There was a local one here, called “All the Bread You Knead,” but it went out of biz. I think breadboxes are a good idea. It’s hard to find them anymore.
My wife and I found an old-fashioned metal breadbox, the kind with the roll-up front, at a garage sale. It’s main purpose is to keep our bread from being nibbled on by our cats.
My mom had one. Even in the days of heavy-on-the-preservative Wonder Bread, I remember the bread going moldy all the time. Putting bread in the refrigerator works for me.
I’m with Lumpy. Before I got a breadbox, it was even odds that I’d find the fresh loaf on the kitchen floor in the morning, with several slices dragged out and the crusts eaten off.
Damn cat.
The breadbox I used to keep the cats out of the bread didn’t keep it fresh. Just kept vermin, large and small, away from the bread.
Breadboxes worked, sort of, because in the bad old days the bread wasn’t pre-sliced. You had to do it yourself, gasp! Ergo there was only one interior end, if that makes sense, to the loaf. All the rest was crust which slowed the loss of moisture some. In addition, the box wasn’t very big and quite rapidly came fairly close to the water vapor pressure of saturation, or at least a high enough vapor pressure to slow down loss of moisture quite a bit. In dry climates you could add a damp cloth to the box to keep its moisture up, but you had to watch out for mold in them.
I think that the best breadbox now is the reefer for opened loaves and the freezer for unopened.
You’re not supposed to keep bread in the fridge. The freezer is OK. You can still buy uncut, freshly baked loaves of bread in, even, the supermarkets. They’re cut it if you ask, but uncut bread stays fresh longer, so I never have them cut it. Hey, I got a knife or two. Besides the regular stores that have freshly baked, uncut loaves, such as Piggly-Wiggly, Harris-Teeter, etc., there are chain stores, such as The Atlantic Bread Co., that bakes fresh bread for your epicurean pleasure.
Just my opinion, but frozen bread sucks. It’s soggy when you defrost it. My mother used to buy bread en masse, and in order to make it last, froze it. My brother and I were forced to eat it and we both hated it. It’s barely useable as toast. I’d think against using it in meatloaf, that’s how much I dislike it. Frozen bread - yuck!!! Fresh bread - yum!! 
Humbug, the whole lot of it, just humbug!
Why? I do it all the time. It doesn’t get mouldy.
It’s not that it gets moldy, or mouldy. It loses its flavor. That said, nothing like freshly baked bread.
I have one of those old stainless steel, rolltop breadboxes. I keep bagged bread in it and it does seem to help. I didn’t expect that. I only bought the box because I liked the look.
This puzzled me, so I speculated that sunlight might have something to do with it. I tried keeping the same brand of bread in an undercounter cabinet, and it lasted even longer without molding – several times longer than it had on the counter, and maybe 50% longer than in the breadbox. Freshness? That’s a different story, but that’s gradual. I felt mold was a more reliable endpoint
For a long time, I had an alternate theory: when the bread was in the cabinet (or in the box the first few weeks) no one seemed to be able to find it [Their minds seemed to reject the big metal box as “not bread” and it became invisible to their search). Perhaps I’m just more careful about how I open the bag and get slices out.
Oddly, we’ve had the breadbox for a few years now, and they still bug me to get the bread, if I’m around, and based on the amount of bread we buy now, it seems that when I’m not around, they do without. (Our family has decided to eat fewer starchy foods) We also use refrigerated tortillas more often than sliced bread now, except on weekends, and I wonder how much that’s due to a psychological resistance to getting bread from the breadbox (the box is in a very visible, accessible shelf, but just above head height for our short family)
I bought breadboxes mainly to keep critters out of my bread - cats, birds, ants, etc. Everything seems to like bread. Anyhow, they’re quite effective for that purpose, and if the bread gets eaten fairly quickly molding is not a problem. At least, it never has been for me. It’s not like the Chicago area is a particularly dry climate, either. Although if you do have bread go moldy in a box you need to wash the box out thoroughly and let it air dry (preferably in sunlight) before putting another loaf inside. Gotta watch out for those spores. Types of bread stored in my boxes has ranged from homemade to storebought + preservatives.
Bread should be kept either in the freezer, or at room temperature. However, I am not a food snob so if you’re happy with the result of keeping it in the refrigerator it doesn’t bother me.
If your frozen-then-thawed bread is “soggy” then something is wrong - somehow you’ve got a moisture leak in your freezer, or the bread wrapper, or something. Or you’re using it half-thawed. Fully thawed bread should be indistinguishable from never-frozen to all but food snobs.
Nope!
(At least not the part about (not) keeping bread in a fridge.)
Bread starts going stale once it’s baked, and water loss is only one part of it. The staling process is not very fast at room temperature, but supposedly faster at fridge temperatures. In the freezer it is almost completelly stopped.
Some of the moisture is lost as vapour, but even if the bread is kept hermetically sealed, it will go ‘dry’, as water gets bound up by starch mmolecules. Heating the bread liberates this moisture, but at the same time even more moisture is lost to evaporation. Then it will go even dryer even faster afterwords.
The conclusion is that bread should be either:
Eaten fresh (best option), or
Frozen immediatelly after baking, and then carefully thawed, or thawed in the oven, but then it has to be eaten immediatelly.
(There is a third option, and that is to make the dough, and freeze it after forming buns, but before baking it. They can then go straight into an oven, in order to create instant fresh bread. (Not suitable for thick loaves - the interior takes to long to thaw.))
At least that’s what Harold McGee claims in On Food and Cooking, a treasure trove for anyone interrested in food.
In the house I grew up in, the kitchen had two drawers (out of, say, 10-12) that were made of tin/metal of some sort, instead of wood (like the rest). I don’'t know for sure what they were actually meant for, but we kept bread in one, and cookie-making ingredients (chocolate, peanut butter, butterscotch, and cherry chips, brown sugar, powdered sugar, coconut) in the other. Bread seemed to last a lot longer in the drawer than anywhere else I have experienced (besides fridge), and the cookie ingredients were always good (and some of them would be there for a good long time). Does anyone with building/remodeling experience know what the purpose of these drawers was, if not legthening life of these products? Also, are these still available if you were to install new cabinets? I miss them, and would like to have them at some point in the future.
Are you my brother? I swear if it weren’t for the Atlanta in your location… We have the same exact drawers in my house (which was also my childhood home) and into them go the same exact things - bread in the first one, and baking goods in the second. I remember my surprise the first time I moved into a home without one, and had to ask… Where’s the bread drawer??
Great. Just great. About half way through this thread I broke for the kitchen and wolfed down three slices.