Community to gather your best bread recipes and answer questions bread related.
Rules:
Depends.
Cold storages makes the amylose retrograde, but in store bought bread there are several tricks to circumvent/prevent this. Retrogradation makes the bread "go dry".
On the other hand, cold storage is more favourable in terms of microbial aspects.
I'd say room temp for homemade bread for a good compromise between sensory and microbial quality.
Half joking... In absolute terms, - convert it to beer. Earliest forms of beer were basically leftover old bread left to ferment. It's not great by itself, and the natural CO^2^ smells green about like rising bread. You'll realize the effects of bittering agents like hops in commercial beer, but if you simply grind up old bread and either a wild ferment or add a little yeast to an air tight container with an air lock valve or sealed and burp it a few times, you can still access a significant chunk of those calories months or years later.