October 26, 2009 - 3:55pm
stale bread smell
HI..
I haven't been baking bread for long. Couple or three months, maybe, something like that.
It has been good. Started off immediately with a great improvement just to the whole house: the smell of freshly baked bread. Wonderful.
But suddenly now I smell stale bread in the kitchen all the time.
Thinking the little children might have dropped bread somewhere I've searched and cleaned in every corner but I can't find anything.
Anyone else ever have this happen? What could be the cause? Surely it is not natural in a bakery, sort of the flipside of the fresh oven bake smell?
How can I deal with it? Anyone know?
regards,
ab :)
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Mold? Or stale tea towel?
Check surfaces like underside of garbage can lid, outside of upper cabinet bottoms, bread board maybe needs a good wash and dry. Where do you let you bread cool? In an open area or where steam rising can condense onto a cabinet or scent curtains or wall paper? I know I have to air my tiny apartment often while baking, first to keep the aromas from inbedding into furniture, and second to tease my neighbors. Keeping the air moving is important and hard to do sometimes as the weather changes and we want to keep the cold out.
Fresh bake smells are great but I keep my fresh wash away from the aromas. Could it be you hung up wet or freshly washed curtains while baking and the scent is hanging there as stale bread smell?
Hope that gives you some ideas.
Mini
Thank you. It does give me some ideas. Mainly it gives me the idea that the lovely fresh bread smell itself gives rise to stale bread smell.
That seems to be what you're saying, right?
and that would suggest that it really is, as I mooted, a sort of natural concomitant of baking bread, the flipside of the lovely fresh smell.
Well, what a nuisance, we really don't get anything for free, do we?
It wouldn't be my tea towels, it could be my breadboard, it could even be the plastic bag under which I let the bread rise day after day - a plastic bag stretched over a plastic perforated bowl which I overturn over the rising bread. The bowl keeping the plastic off the bread, the plastic keeping the air out of the bowl. Fondly thinking I'd developed a wonderful system.
Well it might be a wonderful system but perhaps I should change that bag every day.
It really is a downer. O.K. Major spring cleaning of the kitchen....
thanks,
ab :)
on the shower cap I often use to cover a bread bowl. I think most of the aromas are formed with heat and travel with steam. They are floating around on tiny water droplets in the air. Then they settle on stuff. Baking bread aroma does leave a lasting impression on our memory, stronger than the stale bread one I'm sure.
Mini