Instead of being forced to make banana bread every other day, here’s how you can save your bananas!
Trying to eat healthier means your weekly or monthly food shop consists of buying lots of fruits and vegetables. But, while they are important for our diets, these are the foods we too often find wilting and brown at the bottom of our fridges.
It can feel like you’re spending lots of money on fruits and they seem to go off within days, before you even get a chance to get through the lot.
However, there are a few savvy storage hacks that very few of us know about, which will help to extend the shelf life of fruit.
Food and flavour expert Matt Webster, from Seasoned Pioneers has shared five unexpected storage hacks to keep your fruit fresh for longer.
Bananas
Bananas tend to go mushy and discoloured just a few days after being bought. ,Meaning you either make banana bread or eat them very quickly to avoid food wastage.
In fact bananas are one of the UK’s most wasted foods – with an estimated 1.4 million bananas being wasted in the UK every day! Despite popular belief, keeping bananas in the fridge is the best way to keep them fresh.
Though the skins may go brown, the banana inside will stay fresh for up to two weeks. You can even stop that prominent banana smell covering the whole fridge by putting the bananas in a brown paper bag and tying the top.
Strawberries
Strawberries are one of the worst fruits for a short shelf life. Many of us buy them in a weekly food shop, only to find half of them mushy and covered in mould when it’s time to actually eat them.
This is actually because berries have thin skins and are full of moisture, making them very susceptible to mould. Fortunately there’s a common cupboard spice that can solve your berry problems – cinnamon sticks.
Did you know the chemicals in cinnamon help fight fruit decay? You can stop food wastage by popping a couple of cinnamon sticks in your tray of strawberries to significantly extend their shelf life.
It’s also fine to use cinnamon sticks you’ve already cooked with – which is also a great way to reduce food waste, just make sure you dry them off before reusing. By using cinnamon sticks rather than ground cinnamon, you won’t be left with a lingering cinnamon flavour, just perfectly fresh berries!
Avocados
Avocados contain a lot of benefits, though they can be expensive to buy, you can save money by preserving them for a bit longer – especially after you’ve cut them in half.
Once they’re cut they’ll be brown within hours. So to stop this, you can actually use another vegetable to counter it browning.
You can pop your halved avocado in airtight tupperware with chopped up onions and your avocado should stay fresh and green for way longer.
Tomatoes
Okay so it may seem obvious to place tomatoes in the fridge with your other fruits or vegetables, BUT this can actually spoil their flavour and texture.
Tomatoes actually actually need to be stored at room temperature. The key to keeping tomatoes fresh is by preventing moisture from leaving the fruit, which is why it is recommended to place the tomatoes upside down with the stem side on a plate to reduce air exposure and evaporation.
Apples
Though apples usually last a long time, once they’re sliced they can quickly turn brown. To prevent this from happening you can soak them in salt water.
Salt is a preservative and adding a pinch of salt to the soaking water can keep the apple slices looking fresh. Dissolve a quarter teaspoon of salt into a cup of water. Add the apple slices, let them soak for one–three minutes (be careful not to let the apple slices soak too long, or they’ll absorb the salty flavour), then drain them in a colander. Rinse the slices with fresh water.
So there you have it, try these hacks and see how much food you can save!
