Bananas have several health benefits and a strong flavour loved by many, but one thing they’re not so favoured for is their shelf life.
The soft fruit can become bruised and mushy when moved around, while the outer peel turns blotchy and brown in just days.
While many think that keeping bananas hanging over the fruit bowl is the best place for them, it’s not always true if longevity is the goal.
In fact, according to one health and safety expert, there’s a much better place to keep them.
Speaking previously to Express.co.uk, Gary Ellis, director at CE Safety shared his simple food storage hack to preserve bananas at their perfect ripeness.
Gary claimed: “Bananas emitting ethylene gas is what turns them brown, so in theory to keep them ripe, you should prevent the gas from travelling down and around the fruit.
“One key rule with bananas is to keep them away from other produce.”
That means ditching the fruit bowl and stowing bananas well away from oranges, plums and other quick-ripening fruits, but also apples, figs, peaches and avocados.
The food expert continued: “Fruit bowls with banana hangers over the top of them may look pretty, but these are just going to make your bananas ripen faster as they are near other fruits.”
Setting up a separate fruit bowl that’s dedicated to bananas is one way to solve the problem of overripe fruit, or small hooks under kitchen cabinets are also a good alternative.
Gary claimed that doing this will prevent ethylene gas from spreading between fruits and increase their shelf life. Alternatively, many people choose to wrap the stems of bananas with cling film, which the food expert approves of.
This is especially handy for a bunch of bananas that have been separated and are more at risk of becoming ripe quickly.
The CE Safety professional explained: “This will keep them fresher for longer as it traps the ethylene gas at the top of the fruit where it emits from rather than letting it spread and exposing the other bananas to the gas.”
While the fridge may be a third viable option, it is not recommended for underripe bananas but works well for those that have reached their “perfect ripeness”, as put by Gary.
