It may feel like a race against time to eat bananas before they turn brown and mushy in your fruit bowl, but one woman has revealed that storing them correctly can help them last up to 18 days without spoiling.
To help turn hard, green bananas into ones that are soft, yellow and ready to eat, their stems release a plant growth hormone called ethylene gas. But the same gas also triggers rapid ripening. Other fruits including apples, avocados, mangoes, pears, peaches and berries also produce ethylene gas. When stored together, the combined gas production can cause the fruit to rot prematurely, causing unnecessary waste.
Brenda Anderson, a farmer, chef and founder of Little Lost Creations, has shared a simple but effective hack to prevent this from happening. According to Brenda, ripe bananas should be kept in the fridge to keep them fresh longer, Expressen reports.
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Brenda shared, “A friend of mine told me something she had tried. I thought it sounded a little crazy, but I thought I’d give it a try. She said to put the bananas in a brown paper grocery bag that was sealed tightly and put them in the crisp pair in the fridge She said the skin would turn black but the banana would taste good.
Brenda revealed: “After two and a half weeks in the crisper in the fridge I took my bananas out to try them. I really wanted to try this method. The peels don’t look like the banana will taste good but when I peeled the banana it had didn’t get mushy like I thought it would.”
She continued: “It was still firm and tasted just a little bit riper than when I put them in the brown paper bag.”
The secret to keeping bananas fresher longer is to prevent ethylene gas from spoiling them. You can also achieve this by wrapping the stem in cling film, which prevents the fruit from producing the gas. Another food storage tip is to keep your bananas separate from other fruit, which you can do by hanging bananas from a hook above your fruit bowl. This allows for more air circulation to prevent the ethylene gas from taking effect.
Even if your bananas have gone mushy and beyond saving, there’s no reason to throw them away. You can easily turn them into delicious banana bread or maybe treat yourself to some banana and chocolate muffins.
