April 18, 2019
In a professional kitchen, like the one we have here at Royal Nawaab in Manchester, there is a place for everything. All food must be stored at the right temperature, humidity and safe from cross contamination; not just to ensure the food is right to eat, but to impart the best flavours.
There are a whole bunch of different food items that we guarantee most of you have in your fridge at home which shouldn’t be there. Refrigerators are great at increasing the life span of certain fruits and vegetables, meats and dairy products, but there are some items we commonly store in the fridge which we shouldn’t: but what are they?
Garlic needs a cool and dry place to be stored in but the temperature of your refrigerator is a little too cold for them. Storing garlic in the fridge will cause them to start sprouting and turn rubbery when you try and cook them.
The best place to store your tomatoes is in a basket on your countertop or even in the fruit bowl where they can ripen and develop deeper flavours. Storing them in the fridge causes the membrane within the tomato to become damaged, altering the flavour and giving them a mushy consistency.
Some believe that bread will keep longer in the fridge, but the moist and cold environment actually accelerates the process of bread going stale. Even before the bread has gone stale, storing bread in the fridge will make it tough and chewy to eat.
A pantry is the best place for your spuds as although the darkness – like that which you will find inside your fridge – is good for them, the chill will cause the starch inside your potatoes to turn into sugar, giving you a gritty, sweet tasting potato which will discolour when you cook it.
The popularity of avocados has been on the rise for the past few years, but few people know how to properly store them when they get them home. Avocados need to ripen outside the fridge, similarly to tomatoes. Inside the fridge the ripening process is delayed so you can end up with avocados that are turning brown and mushy on the outside but are still under ripe in the centre. If you want to speed up the process of ripening your avocados, store them near bananas.
We store all our ingredients at the perfect temperatures here at Royal Nawaab’s halal restaurant in Manchester to ensure that each ingredient we use imparts the best flavour possible in each and every dish.
