Why Freshly Baked Bread Gets Hard When It Goes Stale While Cookies Get Soft

Kate Yoshida of MinuteFood explains why stale bread gets hard but stale cookies get softer. It all has to do with retrogradation during the bread-baking process, where starch molecules reorganize from crystallized to viscous and then back to crystallization when bread is cooled, squeezing out the water molecules and allowing the bread to go stale.

Flour - likeall grain-based products - contains starch.And when you add water to starch and heat thewhole thing up past a certain point, the starchgranules start to absorb the water; the watersneaks into the nicely-organized starch moleculesinside each granule and starts bonding with them,loosening up their structure. This process is abig part of what makes bread moist and tender....Because starch molecules REALLY like order - energetically,they want" to get back to a more organizedstructure. So as bread sits around,the starch molecules start reorganizing themselves back into crystals, squeezing out the water thatwas making them all loosey-goosey.

Cookies are baked differently, with far less water, so the starch never has a chance to reorder itself.

Like bread, cakes get harder as theyage because of retrogradation. And while cookies, too, contain water and starch,cookie dough doesn't usually contain enoughwater to interact with all the starch; plus,other ingredients in cookie dough compete for the little water that IS there. So very few of thestarch molecules in a cookie get loosey-gooseyin the first place - and as a result,they never retrograde; so a cookie's staling isalmost exclusively due to moisture migration.

Retrogradation also explains why food tastes better the next day.

Why Certain Foods Taste Better as Next Day Leftovers

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