Tricks to keep food longer and avoid spoiling

The confinement due to the coronavirus has caused us to leave very little of the house, so lengthening the life of food has become a challenge to avoid wasting food. Take note of the tricks you can use during quarantine so that your purchase does not spoil prematurely.

The frescoes under examination

The first thing you have to do if the fresh fruits and vegetables you have bought have plastic is to remove it. Surely they have it because In these unfortunate times of coronavirus, the use of our beloved sustainable and ecological cloth bags is not recommended due to the risk that they may harbor the virus by contact. If you have been given plastic bags or containers to transport your food, get rid of them as soon as you get home so that they do not spoil, unless they are resistant foods such as lettuces or carrots.

As for meat and fish, freeze those products that you are not going to consume immediately in tuppers, or specific plastic bags to freeze, and leave only the one that you are going to cook in a short time in the fridge. If you have a large piece of meat, do not keep it in the fridge chopped or cut, because it will keep better without them..

If you have fresh fish in the fridge, or seafood like prawns, and you're not going to eat it all at once you can cover them with a damp cloth to maintain the humidity of the food, this way you will prevent them from drying out and losing flavor and they will last longer in the fridge intact.

Fresh eggs in the fridge they last 3-4 weeks without problemSo you can rest assured that you can make tortillas, scrambled eggs, pastries, mayonnaise, etc … for many days in this quarantine.

Always ready vegetables

If you have bought fresh vegetables for several days, there are ways to avoid spoiling them before you can cook them all. You can cook the vegetables and store part of the stew in the fridge and freeze the rest to be able to take it out as you need it or you can turn them into preserves.

To always have your cooking vegetables ready and store them in vacuum canning. You can make tomato sauce, ratatouille, eggplant cream, stir-fries … Put your elaborations in previously sterilized glass jars in a water bath for 30 to 40 minutes, fill them to the top with your preparation and tighten the lid well. Place a cloth at the base of a large pot and pour your cans over it, cover them with water and boil for half an hour, depending on the size of the container. This is the traditional method but nowadays there are tools that make life a lot easier in this sense, such as vacuum packing machines. What they do is eliminate all the air from the package in a moment, thus increasing the life of our food, keeping them in perfect condition during more time. Impossible easier.

What if the fruit starts to spoil?

If you have bought a lot of fruit for confinement, it is probably ripening some sooner than you would like. Solution? Make jams, compotes or add them to smoothies or homemade pastries. Ripe bananas are a fantastic natural sweetener, as are dates. You can use strawberries, blueberries, peaches, oranges … to have homemade jam every day for a long time if you vacuum-pack it.

You can also extend the life of your fruits dehydrating them and thus have a healthy snack for these days of isolation. You can use the traditional method with the help of the oven or use technology with a professional food dehydrator.

Watch out for the neighbors!

If you do not want your food to spoil prematurely, be careful how you store it because many times your neighbors can put you in danger. For example putting bananas next to avocados, pears with apples or potatoes with onions will speed up the ripening cycle causing food to spoil much faster than normal. Why does this happen? Due to a gas called ethylene that the fruits give off when ripe and that some more sensitive ones accelerate the process even more. In the case of potatoes and onions, the latter can absorb moisture from the former, causing them to spoil prematurely. Of course, do not leave fruits and vegetables in bags or in hermetically sealed containers because the ripening process can also be accelerated and you would get the opposite effect to what you were looking for.