Leave it out

You don’t need to hear me harping on about the right way to store food. But what’s a blog, if not a place to vent spleen? The long and short of it is: you’ll waste less food if it’s out on show and not lost in the fridge.

The boxes of eggs I bring home sit on the worktop, and if I happen to not use eggs for a while they can sit there for two weeks or more. And they’re fine. And perfect for boiling, poaching, frying or whisking because they’re not fridge cold. You don’t have to keep eggs in the fridge, they stay happy and fresh at room temperature.

Heck, basically this whole post is about what not to keep in the fridge.

Please don’t keep bread in the fridge. The moist conditions, wrapped in plastic, are perfect for breeding the penicillin fur that will have you throwing it out in a few days. Fresh bread is best kept in a paper bag, out on the table, to keep the crust crusty. After a day or two for sourdough this will start to make it stale, the solution to which is sticking it in a plastic bag. Your crust will lose its crunch, but the bread will remain springy and fresh for almost a week.

Mediterranean vegetables don’t like the fridge either. Those poor tomatoes, courgettes, aubergines and peppers have never even heard of frost. Tomatoes in a paper bag sit on my window ledge for over a week sometimes without looking anything less than their best. Courgettes,

admittedly, are best eaten within a couple of days. Subject any of these soft vegetables to the dreaded fridge and they’ll lose half their flavour in shock.

Same goes for strawberries.

Cheese, I grant you, is going to live in the fridge if you don’t happen to have a cellar tucked under your house. So the only point here is to have the foresight to take it out of the fridge a half-hour before you intend to eat it, unless you’re going to toast it or grate it on your pasta. Chorizo, on the other hand, is a preserved meat. Just like parma ham, it doesn’t need a fridge. You’ve seen them hanging up in markets and shops in the summertime in Spain, that ought to be a clue. If anything is going to make a dried meat mankey, it’s moisture.

That’s about it. Take stuff out of your fridge, it’s the wrong place for it.

Actually, let me give you three good reasons to think again about what you shove in the fridge:

1. You’ll throw less food away; even if veg might last a day or two longer in the fridge, if it’s out where you can see it rather than lost in the back of the veg drawer, you’ll remember to use it
2. And the inverse is true; the things you do need to keep in the fridge won’t get shoved to the back by the latest shopping load and forgotten, so you’ll use them up more effectively too
3. Finally, your kitchen will look better. A bowl of tomatoes on the windowsill, eggs in a nifty ceramic egg box, a basket of onions by the back door, a jam jar sprouting a thick bunch of parsley; your kitchen will be looking like Nigel Slater’s snug country den in no time!

Oh, one more. Fresh herbs. As long as they have stalks on, sticking them in a jar of water on the windowsill is going to keep them for a week or more. I don’t know about you, but in a plastic bag in the fridge I’ve found coriander turning into stinky green slurry inside two days. Two quick tips though: (1) the ends of the herb stalks may have dried out, so snip off a little stalk before putting your herbs in water, (2) this doesn’t work with basil, one herb that has to live in the fridge once harvested.