How To Properly Store Greens In The Refrigerator

2024 Author: Gavin MacAdam | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:38

A rare summer resident will refuse to taste food with fresh herbs throughout the year. By the way, fresh herbs should be periodically included in the diet of every person. But the opportunity to pluck fragrant spicy grass directly from the garden is far from everyone and not always. In this regard, the question of how to keep greens fresh and fragrant becomes relevant. We all know to store it in the refrigerator, but not everyone knows how to do it best

Preparing greens for storage

It is not recommended to wash green onions and fresh parsley with dill before storage - they are washed immediately before use. Heavily soiled greens will be enough to wipe with a dry cloth. And if you still really want to wash it, it is advisable to do it not with water flowing from the tap, but in a sufficiently deep container or in a basin. If necessary, it can be rinsed under the tap even later.

The next preparatory step will be a thorough drying of the greenery. First, they gently shake off the water from the leaves, after which they are laid out on a towel on the table. Paper towels are especially suitable for this - on one you need to spread the greens, and on the second, blot large droplets of water. Then the greens are left to dry completely for another fifteen to twenty minutes.

Cold storage

Parsley with dill for subsequent storage in the refrigerator is often placed in clean glass jars, which are tightly closed with washed plastic lids. This method allows you to preserve the greens for a whole month - while it does not dry out, does not deteriorate, and also does not lose its aroma and does not turn yellow.

It will be nice to store greens in vacuum plastic containers - some manufacturers adapt them for storing delicate plants. The assortment of such containers is quite large, so that it is not difficult to choose the desired shape, volume and color. Before laying in such containers, the greens are carefully sorted out, and then thoroughly washed and dried.

There is one more way of long-term storage of greens. Cabbage salad, fresh sprigs of parsley and dill, as well as green onions and spinach with celery can be kept dry for about a month in the refrigerator. In this case, the greens are also not washed, but wiped with a cloth and slightly dried on the table. Then it is placed in ordinary polyethylene bags, tied and poked holes in them with forks to ensure good ventilation. Only after that are the bags of herbs sent to the refrigerator. Spinach in this form is perfectly preserved for three months, a salad cut with stalks - about a month, and celery - about six weeks. Their taste and invigorating aroma remain unchanged in this case.

To preserve the aroma of celery and sprigs of parsley and dill, they are dried at a temperature of about fifty degrees (drying in the sun will not work in this case). Dried fresh herbs are wrapped in polyethylene bags and, tying them, placed in the freezer. Greens will retain not only their color and amazing aroma, but almost all vitamins.

Parsley greens, as well as freshly picked mint and dill can be preserved for several days and in hot weather. For this purpose, dry herbs are placed in dry saucepans, tightly closed with lids. Or, you can first wrap the washed and dried greens in paper (but not in waxed paper), and then put them in bags, which in turn should be placed on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator.

To preserve green onions for at least three weeks, remove any bad feathers from them and moisten the roots with water. Moreover, only the roots are moistened with water, the feathers do not need to be moistened. Then the roots, together with the bulbs, are first wrapped in a wet cloth, and then in paper. After that, the bulbs are tied up at the very bases of the feathers, laid out in bags and sent to the refrigerator.