I froze some bagels whole from an extra large batch I made a few days ago. They’re best same day, but they last a few days a room temperature if you toast them before eating. I was hoping the frozen ones could be easily thawed and reheated once the fresh ones were gone, and then treated as fresh from that point going forward, giving us another few days of bagel enjoyment without the work. If it works well I’d also like to be able to do this sometimes with rolls and other things as making them ahead would make it easy to bring “fresh” bread to parties and stuff.
But I have no experience really doing this. What’s the best way to go about reheating them, and bread in general? Are you a fan of wetting the crust before reheating, or not, and what determines whether that is or isn’t a good idea? What are the most important things to understand or keep in mind?
(FYI I don’t have a microwave. My regular oven is small and heats quickly.)
I like to freeze bread and bagels already sliced, and toast to defrost and heat at the same time, but my mother-in-law regularly pulls entire bags of frozen sliced bread from her freezer and lets the bread thaw (in the bag) for later toasting. It seems to work well despite the condensation risk.
For defrosting an entire uncut loaf, I pulled together these instructions, but honestly have never tried it myself:
To freeze a whole loaf of bread, let it cool completely after baking, then wrap it tightly in plastic wrap and place it in a plastic bag. It’s best to defrost frozen bread with heat rather than at room temperature according to tests done by Cook’s Illustrated.
Place the unwrapped frozen loaf in the oven at 325°F for 20-30 minutes. Check the internal temperature if you have a probe thermometer. At minimum, you’ll want the inside of the bread to be around room temperature and possibly much warmer.
Here’s the full article where I put that info:
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I wanted to briefly update:
I had great success reheating the whole frozen bagels by placing them fully frozen in a toaster oven (NOT preheated), setting the temp to 350f, and leaving them for 15 mins.
They come out virtually indistinguishable from freshly baked.
Cool, that is good to know! Preslicing bagels to freeze is not my favorite task at all, and sometimes you want that fresh vs toasted chew.
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