Slicing Homemade Bread with Ease
Oh that homemade bread fresh from the oven. The aroma, the taste, it just makes your mouth water. It’s very hard to resist. But resisting it is just what you have to do if you want to be able to slice your bread with ease. Here are a few tips on how to cut that homemade bread into perfect slices rather than chunks or bread crumbs.
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Slicing Homemade Bread with Ease
When to Cut
Cutting fresh homemade bread is always exciting, until you figure out it is either too hot to hold, or not firm enough to catch any of the teeth of the knife. Either way, trying to cut bread fresh out of the oven is a lose-lose situation and never comes out as planned.
Letting the bread cool for at least fifteen minutes will make a huge difference in how the bread can be handled and how well it stands up to the knife. You must also take into consideration how many crumbs you want when you slice your bread. The warmer the bread, the harder the crust is, therefore more crumbs. When the bread cools down, the crust becomes softer and produces fewer crumbs.
What Knife to Use
Some people like to hand carve their bread while others are partial to the electric knife method. People have their own favorite bread knife, but no matter which ones you compare, you will find a few major similarities between them.
Every bread knife has to meet two main criteria. The knife has to be thin and sharp. Anything other than that is just added benefit. Some knives advertise their special abilities to cut bread effortlessly and without crushing the bread, but if you keep the knife thin and sharp, you will avoid all of those problems anyway.
A thin knife will help reduce friction between the slices and keeping it sharp will allow the knife to slice through without putting too much pressure on the loaf. Both of these attributes will help to keep your homemade loaf looking more like the machine-cut loaves in the store.
How to Slice
Even some of the best chefs in the world cannot cut bread consistently into same-sized pieces. There are a few tools to help out when slicing your bread and many of them make the process faster as well. One of the tools is a multi-blade device, called a bread-slicing saw, with at least four blades spaced a half inch apart. This allows the bread to be cut into equal slices, four pieces at a time.
Another tool is a bread-slicing guide. This is a box-like device with numerous slits. The slits are sometimes movable, thus allowing the thickness of slices to be adjusted to your desire. The bread guides allow for uniformity, just like the bread saw does, but can help keep the bread in a standard shape while holding it steady.
Yes resisting that bread as soon as it comes out of the oven can be hard to do but it is a necessity if you want perfectly sliced bread every time. The knife and the slicing technique are also an important factor. So be prepared the next time you make that beautiful loaf of bread and it’s a guarantee that you won’t have those breadcrumbs to contend with.
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