Apples can be tough to store, because before you know it, they’re soft and unappetising, rotting in your fruit bowl – but one woman has shared a 1700s hack to ensure their freshness
When buying fruit, you’ll choose the most ripe and juicy looking – but in a few days, it can seriously deteriorate, meaning more often than not it ends up getting chucked in the bin.
Without storing them correctly, apples can fall foul of premature rottenness, and it turns out that people in the 1700s came up with the perfect trick to keep them fresh – but we just haven’t been utilising it so far. The woman who shared it even claimed that apples can be kept juicy and crisp for months. Taking to YouTube, the woman behind ‘The Acadian Garden & Apothecary’ shared what she’d found worked.
“A wonderful way to keep healthy foods without canning, dehydrating or refrigeration”, the video description reads. To preserve your apple, it must be a “perfect” apple – no bruises, no cuts, no insect damage, and the stem must also be intact.
It needs to be packed in a dry, aerated material such as sawdust, grains, heat-dried sand, or newspaper, and then stored in a cool, dry place, away from potatoes, as they produce a gas which will cause the apples to ripen.
This method also works best with fresh apples. picked from an orchard, rather than store-bought, which may have been sprayed with chemicals that affect the ripening process.
Wrapping apples individually in the newspaper when storing them together helps prevent one bad apple from ruining the rest of them because if one of the apples goes bad, the ethylene released will be contained and will not disrupt the other apples around it – meaning your apples will last much longer than you anticipated.
Somebody commented on the video admitting that they’d been storing things “wrong”, penning: “I’ve been storing my produce all wrong. Not so much for longevity, but just in general. Thank you for the little tips on how to care for apples- I may not want mine to last five months, but at least longer than a week will suffice.”
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