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Which vegetables should stay in (and out of) the fridge? | Kitchen Aide


My friend insists you don’t need to keep potatoes in the fridge. Which fruit and vegetables should be kept in the fridge and which out of it?
Cathy, Norwood, south London

Whoa there, Cathy: you keep spuds in the fridge?!? What in God’s name persuaded you to do that (a bog-standard 2kg bag of maris pipers would take up almost a quarter of the entire shelf space in my fridge, for starters), and what other bizarre storage solutions have you come up with? Please don’t say the milk’s in the cupboard under the sink.

On a serious note, Jane Scotter, the fruit and veg oracle who runs the revered Fern Verrow biodynamic farm in the Black Mountains on the Herefordshire/Wales border, warns that the fridge is, in fact, the worst possible place to store certain fruit and veg. Yes, it keeps everything cold, which in some cases helps slow ripening, and hence deterioration, but “the fridge also dries out anything you put in it. Think about where the part of the vegetable that you eat grows, and apply some common sense as to where you store it.” Following that logic, potatoes, as well as onions, carrots and other root veg, are much, much happier elsewhere – a well-ventilated cupboard, say.

Your cold spuds may also pose an unexpected health risk: a 2017 New Scientist report concluded, “Don’t keep raw potatoes in the fridge. At low temperatures, an enzyme called invertase breaks down the sugar sucrose into glucose and fructose, which can form acrylamide during cooking.” This was in response to Food Standard Agency warnings about possible side-effects of acrylamide, especially if the spuds are cooked at more than 120C, which covers all kinds of family favourites, from chips to roasties. Acrylamide, you see, has been shown to cause all sorts of cancers in animal studies, though on the bright side, New Scientist goes on to quote a Cancer Research UK spokeswoman: “This link isn’t clear and consistent in humans.” Which is a relief.

Root veg aside, “The golden rule,” Scotter says, “is if something has gained its sweetness and purity from nature, and ripened in the sun, don’t put it in the fridge.” That means all soft fruit and tomatoes, for example, should never go anywhere near the cold box. “They pick up other flavours incredibly easily, lose sweetness and end up tasting ‘fridgy’.” In the case of tomatoes, it’s even more imperative: the enzyme in the fruit that makes it taste of tomato in the first place starts to break down when it gets below 4C.

Of course, the fridge does have its uses. “If you’re not planning to eat them right away, green leaves, from lettuce to spinach, keep longer in the fridge, as does much green veg,” says Scotter. But leaves are about 90% water, so how to protect them from a fridge’s desiccating habits? She recommends a wash, “in baby bath-warm water – never cold, because that gives them an almighty shock, and never hot, for obvious reasons [ie, it’ll cook them]”, then dry, pop them in a plastic bag and refrigerate. The bag helps create a microclimate – a reusable one, at that – which perks up the leaves no end, “even seemingly limp ones, because they absorb some of the moisture in the bag, so keep a lot longer”.

Do you have a culinary dilemma that needs solving? Email feast@theguardian.com



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