Limit Food Spoilage with 4 Easy Tips
How to limit food spoilage is important for me. I don’t mind cooking as much as I dislike cleaning afterwards. That’s why I prefer to cook more at one time, even if later on the food doesn’t taste as good as in the day it’s made. By so doing though, I have to make sure it lasts for the planned time. Here are my tips.
Store left-overs in glass containers that have tight sealed tops.
Cooked foods stored in glass containers last way longer in the fridge than if kept in plastic ones. Have you noticed this? I did. About a decade ago I started to pay close attention to plastics and other materials used to cook and store the foods. That’s when I decided to ditch plastics.
I started to use glass containers for just about everything and that’s how I made this “discovery.” I couldn’t find a good explanation for it, but didn’t matter, since I noticed it over and over. Believe it or not, when stored in glass, I was able to use some cooked foods for as long as one week. Sounds crazy, right? I’m being honest here, they didn’t spoil.
Think about how many times you forgot about an out-of-sight dish you liked (in a plastic container), only to find it spoiled in the fridge a few days later. In times like this, when resources may be even more limited, storing left overs may be more important.
Surely, plastic containers are lighter and if by accident they fall on the kitchen tiles they don’t break. If closed tightly, no messy spillage occurs either. But the food definitely doesn’t last. And please don’t think aluminum trays are a good replacement, because aluminum has its own dark side (or better said, sides).
I buy almost everything in glass jars and transfer all take out foods in glass containers, especially if they’re unlikely to be consumed and finished right away.
Do not store produce in plastic bags
Have you noticed that fresh parsley or any other herbs you buy and keep in the plastic bag from the store, go bad quickly? You thought you can add it to your favorite dish, only to find it all rotten in the bag you bought only two days ago?
The plastic bags, especially when tightly wrapped around the fresh herbs bunch, keep a lot of moisture and accelerates the spoilage. The same I noticed with fruits and vegetables kept under similar conditions. The fridge drawers for produce have a humidity control setting, this has to be the reason for it.
To limit food spoilage for produce, I take everything out of the plastic bag and keep them just like that in the drawers, over unbleached paper towel.
For something that can cause more of a mess (dill or parsley, for example), I may use a paper bag also untied.
Herbs unlikely to be used within a 1-2 days, I wash, place it in a small paper bag, and put it in my freezer inside the “herbs”-labeled ziplock bag. They cut so easily when frozen and don’t lose much of their flavor.
Do not store easy perishable foods on the refrigerator door
Food spoilage is more likely if kept on the fridge door. The temperature is not as low as on the shelves and with opening the doors often, it gets even higher. That’s why the eggs compartment has an extra cover, to minimize temperature swings that would spoil the eggs faster.
Gallon milk or juice jugs can fit on the doors on the new refrigerators. Did you notice they spoil faster than in the older fridge that you had to replace for other reasons?
I’m not one for conspiracy theories, but I find it ironic that newer generation refrigerators have so much more storage room on their doors. I’m sure you’re asking: Why ironic? If it spoils faster, we buy more.
Other mistakes we make is because we have less time or energy. We’re tempted to buy more at one time, to last for a longer period. When the refrigerator is packed to the max though, there is decreased air flow that affects the correct temperature. Again, many items can get spoiled and we have to go food-shopping again.
As you see, buying more at one time makes us waste more food and spend more money to replace it. Therefore, we have even more practical reasons to limit food spoilage.
Check the packaged meat
We get meat trays wrapped around with a version of saran wrap/cling wrap. Not only that the thin soft plastic wrap contains chemicals that can leach in the foods, but for meats, it doesn’t seal them properly. Liquids from any meats can spill out when wrapped this way.
It may be “a pain in the neck” to correctly put away the meats when bringing everything home, but this can save us from real pain if we get some stomach sickness later on, from uncooked meat juices spilled on another food that’s ready to eat. Uncooked meats of any type can harbor bacteria and cause diseases.
With vacuum sealed meats spillage is less likely to happen, unless the seal is accidentally peeled somewhere or small holes are perked in it. If that’s the case, you can easily identify the damage, remove the wapping and replace it according to cooking plans.
I hate to keep things in any plastic wrap, so I remove any meats, wrap them in paper (before freezing), or wash and salt them, followed by placing them in glass receptacles with tight lids if I plan to cook them later that day or the next.
