Bananas tend to ripen quickly, resulting in them getting spoilt and no longer being of use. Most people tend to leave bananas in a fruit bowl. However, with the amount of ethylene gas that the fruit produces, and the warmth of a kitchen, you’ll find that those conditions speed up the ripening process even more.
Many people have tried various tricks to try and make their bananas last longer, and one that has become popular is storing them in the refrigerator. Keeping them in the fridge slows down the production of ethylene gas, resulting in fresh bananas lasting much longer than they would on the counter or in the fruit bowl.
However, rather than just putting a fresh bunch of bananas you brought from the supermarket straight into the fridge, there is actually a specific stage that they need to reach before being refrigerated.
According to Simply Recipes, the correct time to refrigerate your bananas is when they have some brown speckles, which lets you know that the starch has turned into sugar.
Harold McGee, food science writer, explains in his book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen that “once a fruit is ripe, it can be refrigerated with relatively little discolouration of flesh”. However, “the peel will still turn black”.
If you put a banana in the fridge before it is ripe, it could completely ruin the ripening process. This is because bananas are tropical fruits and do not handle cold temperatures well.
On the other hand, putting a ripe or already brown banana into the fridge will turn it mushy.
Therefore, when it comes to storing bananas in the fridge, if the bananas you bought are unripe, the best thing to do is leave them on the counter or store them in a cupboard until they ripen, and then, when you spot the brown speckles on them, pop them in the fridge to keep them fresh for longer.
While the peel will turn black, when you open it up, you’ll find a banana that is still fresh and perfectly good to eat.