Bread Shelf Life

If the recipe calls for two loaves, you can make three smaller loaves and freeze the excess.

Of course, then you create a situation of running out of freezer space...

Dan Leopard suggests adding approx. 30% of the flour weight in ripe sourdough starter to help the bread last longer.  It seems to be working in my limited experiments.  

Even then the bread still goes stale in a few days because we can't get through an entire loaf in 3 or 4 days.  So after thoroughly cooling the loaf, I slice it and package two slices to a sandwich sized zipper bag with a piece of waxed paper or parchment in between the slices.  These go into the freezer.  

You can thaw the bread quickly in the microwave or I just throw the bag of bread into my lunch bag with the sandwich fillings in another container.  By lunchtime the bread is fully thawed, soft and lovely.  (I keep some staples in the office fridge like peanut butter, mayo, and jelly).  

I make and bake the bread.  Then slice it and freeze it.  That was for sandwiches and stuff you can just break off what you need and toast it.  Works great for us.  That way I can make 4 loaves at one and have 1-2 weeks of bread at a time.

Use a preferment.

Sourdough is a preferment, but simply mixing your dough ingredients together and letting them sit on the counter overnight (say, 8 to 24 hours) before developing the dough is another way to preferment your dough.  You can also do this with a small portion of your dough (like 30 percent) and call it a poolish or a biga (but to me, that's too much work, I just preferment the whole thing).

You can also put your dough in the fridge for a few days to let it preferment slowly. 

All of these will bring out more flavor in your bread as well as add to shelf life. 

I think the way it works is that the microorganisms which will cause your bread to go bad will work before the bread is cooked and consume much of the free sugars, as well as create by-products.  Once it's cooked, the microorganisms have less food left to snack on and so your bread is more resistant to them.

Sourdough!

David

Three ideas for you: Make bread that keeps longer, bake smaller batches more frequently, and store it properly after it's baked.

(By the way, is the problem that the bread dries out or it stales? Leave a loaf in the refrigerator in a plastic bag and it goes stale (tough), but leave a cut loaf in a warm oven and it dries out (brittle).)

Sourdough seems to keep longer, maybe because of the acids that are developed, although I think that may do more to avoid mold than prevent staling.

Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day proposes keeping the bulk dough in the refrigerator and only baking as much as you want on a daily basis. Try some flatbreads like pita that are very quick to make. Try parbaking and freezing, or even freezing the dough.

Avoid refrigerator temperatures for baked bread. Either room temp or freezing and reheating are OK, but temperatures in the 40 F range seem to accelerate staling. I keep my bread in a plastic bag after the first day or so to keep it from drying out. The crumb goes soft, but it toasts up just fine.  

Good luck.