Bananas are a great source of vitamins and minerals, but they can quickly go off if not stored correctly – until now. An expert has shared a clever food storage hack
Food storage hacks are a brilliant way to reduce waste – but when it comes to bananas – it often feels like a losing game.
Many of us keep the curved, yellow fruits in a bowl on our kitchen counters or tables, only to watch them spoil within days. Indeed, it’s not unusual for the skin to start turning brown and spotty, and the inside to become mushy, just three days after purchase.
However, experts at Kitchen Tips Online claim that by making one simple change to how you store bananas, you can slow down this process significantly. They suggest that their easy method could keep bananas at the perfect stage of ripeness for up to 15 days.
In a video shared on their popular YouTube channel, Mike from Kitchen Tips Online showed the results of a home experiment. The food storage enthusiast bought two bunches of bananas from the same supermarket shelf. After bringing them home, he placed one bunch on his kitchen counter and the other in an airtight container, also on his kitchen counter.
He added something called ethylene absorption balls to the container bunch. These clever devices work by interacting with ethylene gas, a natural substance produced in the stem of bananas, reports the Express. This gas spreads to the rest of the fruit over time, aiding the ripening process, which is often accelerated when bananas are separated from their bunch by the firm stem.
While some folks might wrap their banana stems in cling film to keep them from ripening too quickly, Mike from Kitchen Tips Online has shown that ethylene absorption balls are the real deal for keeping your fruit in tip-top shape.
He kept a close eye on his bananas, both on the counter and sealed away, to see how they fared over time. “Day five and six is when we start to notice a significant difference,” he said. By day eight, the difference was clear: bananas left out were much softer than those in the container.
That’s when Mike decided to pop the softer ones into the fridge. According to him, chilling your bananas after they’ve had their time on the counter helps slow down the ripening process inside, even though the skin gets darker.
Fast forward to day 12, and Mike spotted “a little bit of green” still clinging to the container bananas, which lasted until day 15. Sure, there was a touch of bruising – but Mike reckoned that was just from the weight of the container, assuring that the bananas were still “quite edible”.
“Day five and six is when we start to notice a significant difference,” he reiterated.