Revive Stale Sourdough Bread With One Easy Trick You'll Wish You Knew Sooner

Fresh sourdough is a bit of a temperamental food. Sometimes it feels like it goes stale in the blink of an eye, turning from perfectly soft to dry overnight and writing off all your delicious sandwich plans. This is even more true when it's not a store-bought loaf, as homemade bread tends to expire faster. However, the next time this happens, don't give up on your lunch plans quite so soon — there is an easy fix that can bring your sourdough loaf back to life in minutes. And it requires nothing but some running water and heat.

This may sound a bit off the wall, but to restore your bread, you need to wet the loaf with water. That's right — give the loaf a dunk under the faucet to dampen the exterior. From there, throw the wet bread straight into a hot oven for around eight to 12 minutes, depending on the size. Some advice online suggests you wet the base of the loaf, some say the top, others say to wrap it in aluminum foil — but the trick I learnt from bakers themselves was to wet the whole loaf and put it straight into the oven as it is. I ran a sandwich business for four years, and we worked exclusively with a sourdough bakery, so you better believe all those daily bread deliveries added up fast. Leftover loaves were inevitable (and honestly, one of the perks of the job), and this was how I was taught from the bakers themselves to bring older sourdough back to life.

The reason this trick works is because once in the oven, the water will turn into steam and rehydrate the sourdough's interior, bringing it surprisingly close to the fresh and soft loaf it was just a few days before. While the texture won't be the exact same, it's pretty darn close, and the sourdough's signature flavor will also still be intact. Ultimately, however, it should be noted that this little water-and-oven trick works best when the bread still has some life left in it. If your loaf is rock hard and fully dried out, then the small amounts of water that remain won't allow the texture to recover in the same way. And that won't change no mater how much water you douse it in. You still have other options once your sourdough is past the point of no return, but at this point you need to pivot entirely and turn it into the likes of sourdough croutons, a sourdough bread and butter pudding, or sourdough French toast.