Making Beeswax Bread Bags

We go through a lot of sourdough bread. Tricia makes 2 big loaves every other week in addition to bagels, po boy buns and hamburger buns.  The loaves are kept beneath a cake dome, but the bread doesn't stay soft for long and starts getting stale and even begins to mold before we can finish it.  Tricia began looking for a solution and found one - Beeswax Bread bags!  She ordered some organic cotton fabric from Azure Standard and cut the fabric as she needed.

She began to sew the pieces of fabric into the shape of a bag.

These bags will have a drawstring on top for sealing up the bread and keeping the loaves airtight and fresh.

The next thing needed is beeswax.  Fortunately, each time we extract honey, we save all of the cappings and render the beeswax.  We end up with big disks of beeswax.  We make lip balm (chapstick or carmex) by adding essential oils (eucalyptus and peppermint) to the beeswax and castor oil.

But back to our beeswax bread bag project - the beeswax is melted in a crock pot.

The melted beeswax is poured over the cotton bread bags.

You must work fast as the beeswax cools and hardens quickly.

You want to make sure the entire bag is coated on both sides, so a bread-making tool is used to spread the beeswax on the entire surface area.

Once the bag is coated with beeswax, it goes into the oven at 250 degrees F for 10 minutes.  The oven is used as the heat evens out the wax and gets the edges coated.

We allow the bag to hang and dry for a bit.

And now for the test.  A big fresh loaf of sour dough bread goes into the bag for safekeeping.

The drawstring is pulled tight and the bread is now sealed up - better than Saranwrap.

Now we'll test things out and see if this keeps the bread fresher for longer.  Will it stop the bread from getting hard and going stale and molding?  We will soon know.