Even if your bread-baking has continued beyond the long days of pandemic lockdown, sometimes you still find yourself in need of a loaf on short notice, but with shelf after shelf of beautiful breads, how can you find the freshest loaf? You can do your best to judge by color, looking for a golden brown crust, but color isn’t always clear. You can try and smell the bread through its plastic wrapping, or even give it a gentle squeeze, but you still don't know for sure if the loaf is the freshest available. Fortunately, there's an easy way to determine the freshness of your bread: Simply look at the twist tie. It turns out that the color of the twist tie or plastic tag on your bread can tell you how fresh it is. Commercial bread is baked and delivered on a strict schedule, leaving the oven and arriving on your supermarket shelf five days a week. The color of the fastener on your bread bag indicates the day of the week the bread was baked. Bakeries usually have Wednesdays and Sundays off, so there are only five colors to remember: blue, green, red, white and yellow. The color system helps the staff in the store rotate fresh bread in and older loaves out, so you’ll probably only see two colors of twist ties in the bread aisle on any given day. Don’t be fooled, though — if there’s a date on the bread tag too, it’s not the baking date; it’s the “sell by” date. Here’s a cheat-sheet to help you with the colors.
