If you buy store-bought bread, you probably have never had to consider how difficult it actually is to slice bread evenly. Pre-sliced bread is wonderful, but if you make your own homemade bread, you have probably already realized that slicing by hand can be hard to do with consistency.
To top it off, the usual kitchen cutting instruments do not work for cutting loaves of bread and you will often find those kitchen knives just smash the bread or cut it with rough and jagged edges that don’t look very nice.
No one wants to make a beautiful loaf of bread, only to smash it when they are trying to cut it!
If you have experienced this frustration, there is a simple gadget that will make your life much better. If you want to slice bread at home with ease, you need a bread slicer.
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Why is Homemade Bread Hard to Slice?
Homemade bread is hard to slice because the loaves are often very airy and also very soft. If you are not able to let your loaf of bread cool off before cutting, this problem will be even more obvious as the temperature of the bread can affect the ease with which you can slice it.
Homemade bread is also rarely a standard size, unlike manufactured, store-bought loaves, making it harder to get a grip on the bread loaf and cut with the right amount of force to create equal slices.
Smaller, more firm loaves of homemade bread are always easier to cut, but you will still want to consider investing in a proper cutting tool for these needs.
Things to Consider When Selecting a Bread Slicer
You want your bread slicer to work reliably and you want to be sure that you can use it with a variety of sizes of bread loaf. Always check these details when you buy a bread slicer:
- Robust construction
- Guides hold the bread firmly
- Guides do not slip or wobble
- Moveable size selection for slices from thin to medium to large
- Easy to clean
This is an item that you will use all the time if you love to make bread by hand or in a bread machine, so you need to be sure that it will stand up to frequent use as well as making sure that it will deliver nice results for your bread slicing needs.
How to Use a Bread Slicer
If you have invested in one of these wonderful kitchen gadgets, you might be looking at it with some confusion. These kinds of tools have a small learning curve, but they are pretty self-explanatory to use once you have tried them out a couple of times.
One of the first things that you will need to be aware of is undersized or oversized loaves. You may find that your bread maker is creating very small loaves or very large loaves that do not fit as well into the brackets or the tray of your selected bread slicer.
If your recipe is making loaves that do not fit into the bread slicer, you will have the same slicing issues that you did when you did not have the bread slicer. You can choose a different setting for the size of the loaf of bread to manage this dilemma, or you can invest in a slicing guide for these loaves.
A slicing guide is just a small wooden guide with slats that will help you stabilize your cuts for loaves of bread that do not fit your fancy slicer.
Steps to Use Your Bread Slicer
1. Place the plastic guide behind the loaf of bread. This will support the loaf so that it does not slip out the back of the bread slicer as you are working on the slices. This is typically a piece of plastic that slips into the slots of your cutting guide. If you are using a tray-style cutter, just place the loaf in the middle of the tray.
2. Press the loaf back against the plastic guide and make sure that it is positioned in the middle of the two guides evenly. You do not want the loaf to be hanging off the end of the cutting tray. Make sure that you do not press down hard on the top of the loaf as you place it so that you do not compress the loaf.
3. If you have the kind of guide you will need to use a kitchen knife for, you can select how thin or thick the slices need to be by cutting through each slot in the guide or by skipping one or two spaces each time for thicker slices. You can choose to cut thin slices or chunky slices depending on the meal that you are creating.
4. Cut with even pressure and press down gently as you saw back and forth. It is much harder to crush your bread with this kind of slicer on your side, but you can still make the loaf flat if you press too hard as you cut.
5. If you are using one of the tray-style slicers without guides, just be sure to use even pressure and to keep your fingers away from the cutting blade. These cutters are often very efficient but you will need to track the size of the slices that you are cutting without guides in most cases.
You will see how easy it is to cut your own homemade bread with this handy gadget and you will wonder how you ever got by without one!
A Bread Slicer is a Very Helpful Tool to Own
There is no better way to slice your homemade bread than to invest in a bread slicer. These are relatively affordable items that allow you to save time as well as affording you a much more satisfying cutting experience when slicing bread.
You will not be sorry that you added this kitchen tool to your home and each time you are able to slice your own bread with professional results you will be reminded that a bread slicer is an amazing and useful tool.
If you make homemade bread all the time, you simply cannot get by without buying a bread slicer for your home!
Brianna is a self-published author with a passion for sharing her knowledge and expertise on a variety of topics with people who are looking to find the perfect items for their needs. She loves making sure that the right kind of informative content is available to people looking for quality products of all kinds. She is an avid horseback rider and reader when she is not writing.
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