How to Keep Your Fruits and Vegetables Fresh For Longer
Save money and waste with our handy tips on how to store your fruits and vegetables correctly. By prolonging the life of your produce, it will not only taste better but save you money in the long run.
It's a painful experience throwing food in the bin - especially knowing the negative effect it will have on the planet and your wallet. The good news is there are steps we as consumers can take to store our fresh food properly, helping fast-rotting fruits like raspberries stay fresh for longer.
Simple tricks like chopping and storing carrots in glass jars filled with water and treating your soft herbs like flowers will keep them crisp and fresh. Read more of our tips below.
Reduce Your Food Waste
Store vegetables in air-tight glass jars
Keeping vegetables like carrots, celery, asparagus and radishes in an air-tight glass jar, filled with water is an easy solution to keeping them as fresh as possible. Not to mention they'll taste better! Nobody likes to bite into a spongy carrot.
For this tip, you'll need either a Wide Mouth Glass Jar, a Clip Top Jar and water. Simply wash your vegetables and cut them if need be into your desired shape. Pop them into the jar, fill it up with water and secure the lid. This air-tight feature of our jars prevents air and bacteria from getting in and starting the decomposition process.
This tip works a treat if you like to prep your vegetables for snacks or meal prep at the beginning of the week. Change out the water daily to keep them fresh. Your vegetables will last 2 weeks - 1 month depending on the vegetable.
Give your berries a vinegar bath
Berries are notorious for rotting before their time. They are delicious but fragile fruits that need a bit of thought towards how to store them properly. Store them incorrectly, and you could end up with a mushy, moldy berry graveyard in your fridge 3 days after buying them.
We've found the best way to keep your berries from being thrown in the bin is to give them a vinegar bath. The diluted vinegar will eliminate any bacteria on your berries.
The vinegar solution should be a 1:3 ratio of vinegar to water in either a bowl or your clean sink. Empty your berries out of their packaging into the solution and let them sit for 15 minutes. Take them out, give them a rinse with water and dry them as much as possible. A salad spinner lined with paper towels is a great method for drying berries.
You don't want to trap any excess moisture in with the berries, so we recommend leaving the lid on the paper towel-lined container slightly open. Our glass Fresh Storage Containers are commonly used for storing fruits.
Treat soft herbs like flowers
Herbs tend to fall into two categories - soft or hard. If the leaves are tender and green like basil, parsley, coriander and mint, they're classed as soft herbs. Hard herbs with woody stems like rosemary, thyme and sage need to be stored differently. Wash your herbs to remove any debris and pat dry as much as possible before trying the following tips.
Soft herbs left in their packaging and thrown into the fridge will turn into green slime within a matter of days. To keep this from happening, treat them like flowers.
We recommend putting them into a small glass jar with water filled a third of the way up. This way their leaves are left dry but they're still getting moisture from their stems.
Our Preserve Jars or smaller Wide Mouth Jars can be used for this tip.
Wrap hard herbs up in a damp paper towel
Hard herbs love to be wrapped up in a cold, damp paper towel. They won't dry out this way. These herbs tend to be a little more resilient and typically last longer than soft herbs.
