Many people enjoy buying strawberries but find that they are difficult to keep fresh as they often go mouldy after a few days.
This is disappointing as strawberries aren’t the cheapest fruit to buy. Housekeeping 101, a household tips and tricks page on Facebook, has shared how you can keep your strawberries looking the same as if they were freshly bought by using one simple ingredient.
It calls for vinegar to solve the issue of strawberries becoming fuzzy and mouldy. Vinegar can be used in cooking, cleaning and it is the main element of this food hack.
In its Facebook post, Housekeeping 101 shared: “I used to avoid buying lots of strawberries when they were on sale because they were so hard to keep fresh! Recently, I discovered a genius hack from a farmer that keeps strawberries fresh for days!
“They stayed as good as freshly bought, even after several days. All you need is a simple ingredient that’s easy to find at home. Check out the details in the comments.”
The household tips and tricks source suggests mixing a splash of vinegar with some water and then soaking the strawberries in the vinegar and water solution for a few minutes. When the time is up, it says to remove the strawberries from the bowl and use a paper towel to pat them dry before placing the dried berries on a paper towel in the fridge, instead of in a container which will “make them damp and moist” and “encourage the mould to grow again.”
Sheela Prakash, writer for Simply Recipes, has also seconded this hack and explained that the ‘magic’ behind this technique is that the vinegar “kills any bacteria and mould spores on the strawberries that make them go bad quickly, helping them stay fresh [for] longer.”
She added that she has been able to keep her strawberries “fresh for an entire week, and sometimes even longer” by using this method. Real Simple elaborated on why strawberries go bad so fast and said it is due to heat and moisture.
It said: “Strawberries do best in cold, dry environments. The berries [are] porous, soaking up moisture easily, which is why they, along with other berries, tend to rot faster than other less-porous produce.”
Facebook users thanked Housekeeping 101 for sharing this strawberries hack and said they would try it out with comments such as “thanks for the tip, I love strawberries and will try this” and “we’ll definitely have to try this!” Some people who have already tried this hack shared how well it worked for them.
One person said: “This works. Do it every time I buy strawberries.” Another added: “Yes tried that, only threw one away.”
Others gave another popular way to keep strawberries fresh – putting them in a glass jar. A user commented: “I put mine without washing them in a glass jar with a lid and put them in the bottom of my fridge, last ages do this with all my berries!” A second encouraged: “Put them in a mason jar. They last for weeks!!”