To be frank, I don’t learn too many kitchen tricks from my mother. I love her, but she doesn’t cook often and she’s not interested in it like I am. She would admit this to you. That said, she has taught me a cool way to save bread items and cookies in Tupperware: a heel of a bread loaf.
Take, for example, this container of freshly baked cookies. They are soft, chewy, and lovely. You can almost smell the warm chocolate, can’t you? Of course, because you spent time baking these (with these, I will admit that I cheated a bit with some break and bake dough), so you want them to stay as close to their fresh-baked state as possible. You know that air is your enemy here. It will leach all of moisture out of your cookies. In a couple of days (if they last that long), they will be something akin to bad Chips Ahoy! cookies–which let’s just admit are bad to start with. So what are you to do?
This is where the bread comes in. In the container somewhere, stash a piece of bread. It can be the heel, a lone left over slice or whatever’s handy. It can even be frozen! Put it in and seal the container. After a couple of days (again, if they last that long), check the bread. Your cookies should still be soft, but how’s that bread doing? Is it dry? Yup. That could have been your cookies. If you plan on keeping the cookies longer than another day, replace the bread with a fresh slice and seal them back up.
But let’s be honest with each other. Those cookies might make it to the third day, if they’re lucky.
I don’t know if this works with store-bought cookies. I’ve never tried it. I have stuck a bread slice in with a loaf of banana bread and pumpkin bread. It seems to act the same, preserving the moistness of the bread. Try it out, let me know how it works for you!
Rebecca's Kitchen Escapades 