Why does warming up a baked good make it seem more fresh/less stale?
In: Chemistry
The molecules are excited when something is heated and allows for a greater volume of those molecules to escape into the air and spread out. As for the biology side, Why does eating anything warm seem more fresh/less stale? This boils down to heat presenting a greater sensation of smell along with taste. You cannot smell a cold cookie as well as a freshly baked steaming one, could you? This probably comes from our hunter gatherer ancestors. After they hunted food, they were able to tell how fresh a carcass was by the temperature and smell of the insides.
Wheat is like a bunch of lego blocks (sugar molecules) that you stuck on top of each other to make a really tall stick (starch).
When we make bread, we break down the stick into individual bricks so that we can get all the lego bricks back into the toy chest with the help of your siblings, Water and Heat. This is obviously lame because lego bricks are made to be used to build sticks in your mind, so over time, you start to rebuild your stick. This is stale bread. Heat left to go play fortnite a while ago, and Water is slowly becoming bored and less interested, eventually just kinda hanging around, but not doing anything to stop you from rebuilding your stick.
Heating it up is essentially just repeating the process of smashing the stick into the individual LEGO blocks and getting them back in the toy chest, and because Heat loves breaking things and Water decides they want in again, you all join in in breaking the stick down.
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