Whenever I buy bread, it's flavor and texture is amazing in the first day. The bread is humid and soft. In 2 or 3 days, it gets hard. Is there some trick to renew the bread to a nicer state?
Bread – trick to turn old bread into almost-new bread
bread
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Very simply, bake it for the recommended time in the recipe. Then if it looks golden brown (note that if the air in the oven is not humid enough the bread may stay pale, on a side note a humid oven helps to develop a good crust), tap it in on it's base and if it sounds hollow its done. If it feels soft in the base and not hollow or If its still not golden brown, put it back in the oven for a few minutes then try the tap check again. Although you stated you dislike the thermometer technique, for others reading the bread should have an internal temperature of 200F or 94C, if not return it to the oven for a few minutes until it is.
Assuming that this is what you want:
This kind of crust is made with steam injection. Normal household baking methods will give you a thick crust, which is usually also hard. Wetting and covering it right out of the oven will give you a chewy crust. If you bake the bread in a fitting pan and tweak the recipe, you can get thin, almost non-existant crust, but also soft, like sandwich bread.
For what you see in the picture, you need standard French bread dough (60% hydration, AP flour) and a blast of steam in the oven at the beginning of baking. Sadly, homemade steam methods which rely on evaporation won't work, because there is a limit to the amount of water which will evaporate even of high temperatures, and you need to get more steam inside than that. So, you'll either need a pro oven or a steam modding (which only works on an oven with vents, unless you are prepared to drill a hole into the oven cavity).
For extra tweaking the crust, you can use a glaze. We had a question explaining the different glazes and their results.
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Best Answer
While it is never possible to restore bread to its fresh baked glory, toasting can help.
The main staling mechanism in bread is the re-crystalization of the formerly gelatinized starches, making the bread seem hard and dry.
Toasting heats the bread up, and helps the starches re-gelatinize, and so can help mitigate the staleness, although it is not a complete cure.