The Stale Paradox

My friend, Chris Gorman, came up with this one:

Soft things, like bread, get hard when they get stale.
Hard things, like cereal, gets soft when it gets stale.

So, say you take something that’s already stale, like stale bread, and
repackage it as croutons, they get soft when they get stale, right?
How many times can this cycle repeat itself?

Answer:

from Adam GANDERSON

It’s actually a function of the food reaching equalibrium with the ambient humidity. As such, how often you can “cycle” your food depends on how much/how often the humidity changes. Note that temperature changes can effect flavor chemistry, and bacterial and fungal growth rates are increased in different parts of the cycle. I could go on to water activity versus water content (which takes into consideration concentration of compounds like salt or sugar that “tie up” water.) But that’s beyond the scope of this course.

The short answer? Entropy is a bitch my friend. And she always increases.

Love and felches,
Tappan

Sent from my iPhone