How to Store Fruit and Vegetables So They Last Longer 🍎🥕

You unpack carrots, apples and a head of broccoli together, and a week later the broccoli is yellow and the carrots taste oddly bitter. My grandmother in Cape Breton always said one bad apple spoils the barrel, and she was closer to the science than she knew.

Here is the kitchen taken apart spot by spot: what goes in the fridge, what stays out, and what should never share a drawer.

The gas behind it all

Many ripe fruits give off ethylene, a gas that tells fruit to ripen. Sensitive produce nearby gets the same message and ages faster.

• Producers: apples, pears, stone fruit, melons, avocados, tomatoes, ripe bananas.
• Sensitive: broccoli, carrots, lettuce, green beans, peppers, unripe bananas.

So Gran had it half right, because one ripe apple won't rot the whole barrel, but it will hurry along every sensitive vegetable near it.

The counter

Job: ripening, and a home for produce that cold damages.

• Bananas: cold stops ripening and blackens the skin.
• Tomatoes: the fridge dulls their flavour and softens them. Keep them out of direct sun.
• Avocados, pears, peaches, plums, mangoes: ripen here, then move to the fridge.

Hidden tip: to ripen a hard avocado or pear faster, close it loosely in a paper bag with a ripe banana or an apple. Use paper, never plastic. Plastic traps moisture and the fruit spoils instead.

The cool, dark cupboard

Potatoes, onions, garlic and whole winter squash want dry, cool, dark and airy.

• Potatoes: in the fridge they can darken and cook up oddly sweet. Light turns them green, so trim any green away.
• Onions: a mesh bag, on their own. They pull moisture from vegetables stored beside them.
• Garlic: the fridge can make it sprout.

The fridge shelves

Set the fridge to 4°C (40°F) or colder. Berries, grapes and cherries live here, loosely covered in a shallow container. Cover cut fruit tightly and use it within two or three days.

Hidden tip: apples soften about ten times faster at room temperature. In a perforated bag in the fridge, they keep for weeks.

The part nobody checks: the crisper slider

Many crisper drawers have a small vent: open means low humidity, closed means high. Ignore the picture on the front and read the slider.

• Vent open (low humidity): apples, pears and other ethylene producers. The vent lets the gas out.
• Vent closed (high humidity): leafy greens, broccoli, carrots, peppers.

At the B&B, Angus's garden carrots get the closed drawer and the breakfast apples get the open one.

Wash later, not now

Apart from leafy greens, don't wash produce before storing it, because washing makes it spoil faster. Rinse under cool running water just before eating.

Greens are the exception: wash, dry well, wrap loosely in paper towel in a bag or box, and use within a week. Bagged pre-washed greens need no second wash.

Cheat sheet: where everything goes