Eat

The Internet’s Favorite Trick for Storing Bread Also Happens to Be the Best

published Apr 15, 2024
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Credit: Lisa Freedman

There are two types of people in this world: those who re-close their bread bags using the little plastic squares with a hole in them that come on the package, and those who don’t.

I am the latter type; I don’t see any reason that giving the bag a spin to twist the plastic and tuck it back over shouldn’t be just as acceptable. My husband, unfortunately, is the former type. He’s an avid user of those bread clips (that’s the technical name), despite the fact that he will also leave a plate of leftover pancakes sitting in the open air on the counter like they might still someday be edible after that.

Lucky for both of us, there is a better way. One of social media’s most popular kitchen tricks proposes a happy medium: a solution for closing the bread bag completely without using the tiny piece of plastic that inevitably pops off and gets lost under the toaster somewhere.

The trick, as shown on this Instagram post titled “Lifechanging Kitchen Hacks,” simply shows a more advanced version of the haphazard twist-and-fold strategy I have employed for the better part of four decades. After giving the bag a nice tight twist, you simply pull the remaining plastic backward over the bread, so that the twist stays firm and the bread package stay closed. Brilliant, right?

I’m not sure where this fits into my personal favorite meme on the topic, the bread storage alignment chart, which had previously categorized my husband’s bread clip reuse as “lawful good,” and my own twist and tuck as “chaotic good” (a pretty accurate reading of our overall personalities, I would say), but given the popularity of the tip on TikTok and Instagram, I’m guessing we’ll need a new version of the chart that tells us where this goes. In the meantime, I’m curious to see if using this in our house mollifies my husband’s very much lawful good instincts. 

This post was originally published on The Kitchn. Read it there: The Internet’s Favorite Trick for Storing Bread Is Also the Best