Rinsing bread

Alexander wanted to have a sandwich for lunch. The only problem is...we were more or less out of bread. I told Alexander as much, but he wouldn't believe me. 

"Let's go check the outside fridge!" he said. 

"I don't think we have any bread out there, either," I said.

"We do!" he said.

"I don't think so."

"Let's check!"

So we went to check and came back into the house wailing (let me clarify that it was Alexander doing the wailing; not me). 

"Sorry, buddy," I said. "We just don't have any bread. We can come up with another idea for lunch, though. We have leftover pizza or..."

"I want a sandwich!" he cried, big alligator tears escaping down his cheeks.

"How about we make a peanut butter and jam sandwich on a tortilla?! That could be fun!"

"No, it couldn't! I just want bread!"

He was having quite the emotional breakdown over this, so I grabbed the remaining loaf of homemade bread from the counter—stale as could be—walked over to the tap, and started rinsing it under the water.

Everyone stopped and stared at me. 

"What are you...what...what are you doing?"

"Saw this on Call the Midwife," I explained. "I have no idea if it works but...if it doesn't we don't lose anything," and I popped the bread into the oven to reconstitute.

Turns out it works!

I got the loaf a bit soggier than I should have (you're supposed to keep the water solely on the crust; don't wet the inside part of the bread...) but we were able to get a couple of slices nice and fluffy for Alexander's peanut butter and jam sandwich. The day has been saved!

I suppose I could have researched it before I tried it, but that wouldn't have had as much shock value as simply grabbing a loaf of bread and running it under water (because for some reason that's not a thing we routinely see people do anymore). If I had done research prior to this experiment, I would have learned to only wet the crust. But...I know now.

You can read about it on Lifehacker (it's this blog that shares tips on how to make life easier)* or you can watch Season 9, Episode 5 of Call the Midwife (31:40) to learn more about it. 

* When we were first married, Andrew was rather obsessed with Lifehacker. He would tell me about articles from Lifehacker all the time and every time he did so he would give me his little preamble of, "I read about this thing on Lifehacker! Lifehacker is this blog that shares tips on how to make life easier..." or something like that. One day I cut him off and gave his preamble for him, which shocked him. "How did you know?!" he asked. So I told him that he told me the same thing every time he told me anything from Lifehacker and that by now I was well aware of what Lifehacker was. We still joke about this...