How to keep your sourdough fresh

Our bread is flour, water, starter and salt. Nothing else goes in, which is the point, but it does mean your loaf will not sit happily on the counter for a fortnight the way a wrapped supermarket one does. Treated properly it will give you a week of very good eating.

The first three days

Keep the loaf in the paper bag it arrived in, at room temperature, cut side down on the board.

Paper matters here. Plastic traps moisture against the crust and turns it soft and leathery within a day. Paper lets the loaf breathe, so the crust stays crisp and the crumb stays moist.

Do not refrigerate it. A fridge is the fastest way to make bread go stale, faster than leaving it out.

After three days, freeze it

This is the part most people skip, and it is the one that matters.

Slice the whole loaf before you freeze it. Then take out only what you need and toast it straight from frozen, no defrosting. A frozen slice takes about a minute longer in the toaster and comes out almost indistinguishable from fresh.

If you freeze the loaf whole you have to thaw the whole thing, and once thawed it goes stale quickly. Sliced, it keeps for a couple of months and you lose nothing.

A few things worth knowing

• A slightly chewy crust on day two is normal. Thirty seconds in a hot oven brings it back.
• The crumb tightening up is the starch retrograding, not the bread spoiling. Toasting reverses it.
• If your loaf smells faintly sour, that is the wild fermentation doing its job.
• Bread that has genuinely gone off will show mould. Ours has no preservatives, so throw it out rather than cutting around it.

Why it goes stale differently

Commercial bread often includes enzymes and shelf life extenders to slow staling. We use none, so what you get is bread behaving the way bread has always behaved.

The twenty four hour ferment helps here. A long, slow rise develops more acidity, and that acidity slows staling naturally. It is the reason a proper sourdough keeps better than a fast white loaf, even without anything added.