Just changing some regular habit, you will not have to throw away food that is good for health. Some of the following tips will definitely help housewives to preserve food for a long time without worrying any more. If you have money, the better way is to buy a vacuum sealer to preserve food by reading some vacuum sealer reviews. But if you want to save money, the following tips are also useful for you.

  1. You should classify vegetables before storing in the refrigerator

Before storing in the refrigerator, you should classify separate each type of vegetable and fruit and put it into the different bag. The reason is each type of vegetable has the different time to store and some type can be damaged faster than others.

  1. The temperature to store

In order to have fresh vegetable longer, you should store it in the refrigerator at temperature of 1 – 4 C degrees. The bacteria usually grow faster if vegetable is stored at temperature above 4 C degrees. On the other hand, if you store vegetable in the lower temperature, the vegetable will be frozen and damaged quickly.

  1. You should not wash vegetables before putting in the refrigerator

You should not wash vegetables before storing in the refrigerator and just wash it before taking it out of the refrigerator and you are ready to eat. The reason is too much moisture will cause discoloration for vegetable and it will be damaged easily as well. For tuber vegetable such as beets, carrots and kohlrabi… you should cut the tops before storing in the refrigerator.

  1. You can use a plastic bag

Most of fresh vegetables require 80 – 95% of humidity while the humidity of refrigerator is just around 65%. Therefore, you should put the vegetables into plastic bags to prevent the evaporation of water when in fridge, especially vegetables do not have peel.

However, you should not use plastic bags for mushrooms as mushrooms contain 90% of water and it will be soft quickly when you put it into a plastic bag. Moreover, mushrooms can absorb odor from heavy smell food. So the best way to preserve mushrooms is to put it in a paper bag.

  1. You should preserve vegetables and fruits separate

Most of fruits and vegetables are classified into 2 groups: one group is considered as the manufacturer of ethylene and other group is sensitive to ethylene. Therefore, if you preserve 2 groups together, the sensitive group will ripe faster. Apple, papaya, banana, avocado and tomato are considers as the manufacturer of ethylene and some vegetables such as lettuce, broccoli, lemon, orange and carrot are sensitive to ethylene.

  1. How to preserve vegetables with dark green leafy

Lettuce and some kinds of herbs should be stored in the plastic boxes with a special zip lock. These boxes specifically designed for the preservation of green leafy vegetables. These boxes often have many cabinets and plastic groove in the middle of the boxes for air circulation or these boxes will have many vents.

If you do not have this type of box, you can use a plastic bag with zip lock and an absorbent paper to preserve vegetables. You put 1 or 2 sheets of absorbent paper in the plastic bag, then you put vegetables in and zip back. The absorbent paper will help to drain moisture because the plastic bags do not have vents. You can apply this tip to some kinds of vegetable such as lettuce, spinach, green mustard and some other similar vegetables.

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