Is it any good? Picking the Freshest Ingredients for Your Food

Left is future banana bread, Right is future banana snack!

The question that always seems to bother most people when trying out new foods is how do you know if something is good enough to eat? For the uninformed, under ripe and over ripe are just plain guesses which could lead to some sad results for those who guess wrong. Besides wasting good food, it wastes your money and your valuable fridge space to be making those guesses uneducated. So today we are going to explore the lovely world of when it’s good for a variety of fresh foods.

First off, let’s handle the giant misconceptions on one important aspect of freshness determination: the expiration date. You have probably heard things from John Oliver’s report on expiration dates about how arbitrary they are and if you haven’t go do so, it’s a wonderful piece yet I disagree with this point he makes about how they are basically useless. I find they do have a minor use, even if they are different depending on the coding used. Any sort of dated listed as “use by” should be ate or drunk before the date listed, however with anything else treat the date as a “this will taste the best before this date”. As a simple guide, milk can go a week after sell by, eggs can survive three to five weeks and any meats are pretty much a day or two after. If you want to stretch out the life of your meats it is best to freeze them and thaw as necessary. Knowing that can help you a lot in the wallet by making sure you get certain meats when they are on sale and not buying them any other time.

Eww...molded blueberry.

Now, onto the fun part, produce! There are a lot of tricks that only apply to certain types of fruit or veggie but we’re going to focus on the more general ones. First off, those berry containers. The bane of my existence as they tend to cause less freshness and more mold to form within seconds. Too often have I just bought a container of strawberries, blueberries, or raspberries only to find that it has gone and molded overnight. Some stores are more notorious for this problem than others, but the key thing I have found to avoid this tragedy is to always, always double and triple check all sides of the container. Shake them if you want too, because if there is a bad berry, it is hiding probably toward the bottom or sides, as those are where berries get squished and those berries are the ones most likely to mold. Also if you do find a moldy one, flip it so that people can see the mold spot clearly and, if there is a worker nearby, notify them of the bad berries so they can remove it from the pile quickly. It’s just polite, after all, you’d hope someone would do the same for you, right?

Squeeze me!

Mold is not the only enemy within the produce section, there is also ripeness to consider and this is where a few key things need to be kept in mind. First, all fruits will have a sweetened smell when ripe. It’s the easiest indicator, because fruit evolved to have animals eat it in order to transplant its seeds elsewhere so that’s how it tells all the animals in the area that it is good to eat. Also if a fruit is squishy, it’s probably overripe except for mangoes, and avocados. Those two tend to be ripe if they have a little bit of a give to them. A quick squeeze will tell you if they are ready to eat. Some also can be figured out with a quick knock for a hollow sound, like watermelon and pumpkin, but sometimes that can be iffy with watermelons so it’s better to go off of if the lightest spot of the watermelon is white or yellow. If it’s yellow, it’s ripe.

Overall though, if you are unfamiliar with an ingredient but need it for a recipe, do use the internet to take a look or ask the workers at the grocery store. However, since we are technically a part of the internet, what tricks do you all know on how to check if something is good to eat? I’ll be honest, until my boyfriend told me that you test mangoes like avocados, I had been winging it my whole life. Learn something new all the time, which is why I wouldn’t mind you all spreading your freshness knowledge here before I see you all again next Horror Tuesday.