We don't expect all of our readers to know everything about cooking. At least some of our readers probably aren't expert chefs (though, yes, we assume that most are). It's OK if everyone doesn't know how to properly prepare a blowfish, or how to pair the right wine with the right dinner. You're not a master chef by any means, but you still know a few basic food truths, right?

9 Bread Gets Stale Because It Loses Its Moisture

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The sandwich is, without question, the best thing ever discovered by man (suck it, penicillin!), and bread is the most dedicated soldier in the sandwich's army. Bread makes it possible for loose meats and stray condiments to transcend their differences, to come together and celebrate their tastiness in an organized and mutually beneficial fashion. It brings order to your fridge; without the bread's stern but fair confines, what would keep your deli meats in line? Or your peanut butter and jelly? You'd have to just eat a spoonful of peanut butter and then desperately chase it with a shot of jelly. You'd be pounding fistfuls of various meats into your maw and chugging Grey Poupon just to feel something. Bread fixes all that and keeps your food safe and easily transportable. It's like an edible envelope that mails food letters straight to your mouth.

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Time for FedEx overnight.

That's why coming home to a loaf of stale bread is absolutely the single worst thing in life (suck it, AIDS!). You've got your meats, your cheeses, your oils and vinegars, but the bread is hard and brittle and utterly incapable of inspiring order in anything. It's dry. You must not have sealed the bag, or maybe you left the bread out on the counter in the sun, thereby robbing it of all of its sweet, precious moisture. Surely that's what happened, right?

The Reality:

Wrong. When your loaf becomes stale, it's not because it's dried out; the opposite is actually true. When bread gets too much moisture, the starches in the bread start to crystallize, making the bread tough and crumbly. Maybe you know some people who store bread in their refrigerator to prevent it from going stale. Those people are not your friends. Low temperatures actually help to speed up the crystallization process, like baguette Viagra.

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It's too late for this loaf. Just look away now. Look away.