It might seem like a no-brainer to pop all your veg in the fridge’s draw, but when it comes to onions and garlic, that’s actually one of the worst things you can do. Stashing these culinary staples in the fridge can speed up their spoilage, turning them soft or squishy as their starch morphs into sugar.
Instead of banishing onions and garlic to the cool confines of your refrigerator, they thrive best outside of it, in a spot that’s both shadowy and breezy – think kitchen corner far from the damp and rays. Tucked away in a drawer or cupboard, onions and garlic could stay sprightly for half a year if they’re nestled in just right.
Camille Hoffmann, a maestro of the cookery arts at ‘Cook’n and Eat’n,’ has spilled the beans on a spiffing storage strategy – ensuring onions and garlic go the distance “twice as long” by cosying up in a paper bag riddled with holes, reports the Express.
In her words: “The waste of onions took a serious decline once I learned this neat little trick. It’s a unique way of storing onions and garlic- and it has truly worked! It involves paper bags, a hole punch, and some hand muscle.”
This homespun hack defends against damp with its paper barrier, while the punctured pattern plays sentinel for air flow, safeguarding your aromatics dry and durable for ages.
All it takes is a simple brown paper bag, folded top-to-tail then side-to-side; track down a hole puncher, and let it rain holes down each flank.
Camille remarked: “This will help to cut down the amount of hole punching you need to do; I promise your hands will be wanting as much of a break as possible with all the hole punching you will be doing.
“But it will be worth it when you grab that onion two months later and it’s still as fresh as the day you bought it from the store!”.
By filling your paper bags halfway, labelling them, and then folding the top over a couple of times – held fast with a paper clip – you can ensure longer-lasting onions and garlic.
This technique, known as the paper bag method, can keep these kitchen essentials sprightly for three to six months, trumping the original supermarket plastic as it prevents dampness and decay.
She added: “My onions easily last two to three months and usually that’s about when I get around to using them all.”
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