These fruits should be banned from your baskets… they ripen those around them too quickly!
Eat 5 fruits and vegetables a day – that’s what we’ve been told since childhood! Fruit is particularly popular in France in summer. Bananas, peaches, apricots or melons, the fruit baskets are full!
To avoid rotting your favorite delicacies too quickly, avoid placing certain fruits next to other fruits and vegetables.
Ethylene: the key to ripening
As the hours pass, climacteric fruits, which continue to ripen after being picked, can influence the ripening of their neighbors, accelerated by elements such as natural gases.
One of them in particular, ethylene, is particularly effective in ripening your fruit… to the point where this process can go too fast! Here’s a list of the best-known climacteric fruits:
- banana, apple, tomato, passion fruit, persimmon, mango, pear, peach, apricot, kiwi, melon, guava, watermelon, papaya, plum, avocado.
Is ripening fruit good?
Soft or rotten fruit and vegetables – that’s what we all want to avoid. That’s why the fruits that give off the most ethylene should be banned from your baskets.
This colorless, odorless gas is often released when the fruit in question is ripe. It then ripens the surrounding fruit and vegetables!
For certain foods, such as potatoes, that are far from ripe and need to receive this ethylene, you can place them under a bell jar with the fruits that give off the most ethylene: apples and bananas. However, ethylene can quickly make your fruit unappetizing, if not downright disgusting.
Here are the effects of ethylene on fruit:
- softening,
- production of more sugar,
- reduced acidity,
- disappearance of chlorophyll (fruit does not turn green).
Vegetable alert
While beneficial for certain fruits, ethylene is harmful to vegetables. Watch out for crispers in fridges, where fruit and vegetables are often placed next to each other.
This gas is released around ripe fruit, and vegetables deteriorate more quickly.