A few months ago someone asked about how to prevent the crusts of
breads that have been frozen and then thawed from cracking and
crumbling. I answered with a few suggestions about slicing the
loaves before freezing and possibly removing the loaves from the oven
at 195 deg F to retain some moisture in the crumb which then might
help keep the crust slightly moist after freezing.
I have since found that there are two other ways that work but they
involve altering the recipes.
About a year ago I posted a pizza dough recipe that contains about
40% semolina and 60% all-purpose flour. I mix a batch size that
makes two 11"X17" pizzas. Sometimes I only plan on one pizza using
half the dough so I will shape the other half of the dough into
either a baguette or into several rolls and bake them in the hot oven
after the pizza is out. This bread has a softer, chewy, pull-apart
crust which when frozen and thawed, gets firmer but does not break
off. The coarser semolina seems to keep the crust from becoming
brittle. You might start with 20% semolina, 80% all-purpose and see
if it makes a difference.
"Cooks Illustrated" recently published a ciabatta recipe which uses
about 20% milk and 80% water. The milk supposedly weakens the gluten
and keeps the holes in the crumb from getting too large or forming
tunnels. But the milk also softens the crust slightly, just enough
that when I froze one of the ciabatta loaves and thawed it a week
later, the crust did not fall off. BTW, the "Cooks." recipe and its
handling and shaping procedure works very well.
Werner