I know our experience is that they are better if frozen right away . Particularly enriched baked goods such as biscuits and our biscotti and cake. My SD breads are always sliced and immediately frozen, just in a freezer quality zip Lock, no special treatment otherwise.
I thaw the bread slices out on the soapstone counter while preparing whatever else we are having. Same with all the other items.
Here’s a discussion from 2012:
https://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/29182/can-freezing-actually-improve-baked-loaf
AI- Freezing itself doesn't improve flavor, but it preserves it by slowing spoilage, maintaining moisture, and preventing the loss of volatile aromatic compounds. When baked goods are frozen at peak quality and thawed properly, the results can be a flavor that tastes fresh and developed because the volatile components didn't have time to escape before being locked
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When my mother and I chat about cooking, we often note that we usually don't find what we cook flavorful if we eat it the same day; certainly we don't enjoy it as much as the people who didn't participate in the cooking. However to the cook, the leftovers are almost always tastier, in our experience. Probably because we've been smelling the food as it cooks for however many hours; we don't find this effect to be significant when we do all the cooking outdoors, by contrast.
I think the human brain does somewhat "tune out" the scents of food when we've been hanging around in them for hours while cooking; nose blindness, and all that. The majority of what we think of as taste is from scent, of course.
Bread fills the home with its aroma for hours. I suspect that if you brought your neighbors a slice of wheat bread the day you pulled it out of the over and then another slice the next day, they wouldn't find as much of a difference as some folks in the linked thread were describing. Possibly still some, but when I last bought a loaf of bread from the store and froze most of it, the slices out of the freezer were slightly more dull in flavor.
As for the textural changes -- and let me note that here I'm summarizing a few things I've learned over the past couple decades and am absolutely not an expert nor am I going to dig up sources... Chilling starches after cooking causes some of them to convert to resistant starch, which can feel different when eaten. White rice generally has a reputation for getting hard or even crunchy after refrigeration (e.g. consider leftovers from Chinese takeout). Though strains of rice, let alone other plants, differ in their starch composition and not all starches convert to resistant starch when chilled.
There is no way to undo that conversion once it happens. Personally with wheat bread I do find it becomes slightly stiffer in texture after freezing. I don't care for that but warming the bread slightly nearly eliminates my perception of the difference.
There may be other factors contributing to the differences discussed, but I suspect that a degree of nose blindness and a preference for the texture of resistant starch are both part of what people were noticing.
Since my husband cooks Chinese stir fry very frequently there is a different set of circumstances. He does all of it outdoors on his 100,000 btu propane burner. There are pictures on one of my recent posts. He’s been doing this for over 54 years now. Until 2017 when we got the burner it was always in the house but we had amazing ventilation over the stove.
I personally despise lingering food odors in a home so go to great lengths to make sure it never happens.Cooking outdoors completely eliminates the lingering odors and the palate is instead salivating at the abundant scents and flavors. One eats it as it is served immediately from the wok. No lingering only diving in!
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