A good guideline is to look where your local supermarket stores food. Ever seen tomatoes in their fridges…or eggs?
Any fruit or veg stored in the fridge stops the ripening process, so only if you need to store your fruit/veg for sake of duration, then keep it in the fridge. Remember that tomatoes especially, lose their flavour in the fridge so if you intend making a tasteless spaghetti Bolognese, then you know what to do.
Baked goods come out best when using room temperature eggs, so keep them in a pretty bowl on the counter. Let’s not forget that supermarkets and food stores have air-conditioning – most if all of us don’t have air-conditioning in our kitchens, so if you’re experiencing exceptionally hot weather, then pop them into the fridge. Once again, as with the tomatoes, eggs lose their flavour when stored in their little eggy containers in the fridge, so leave them out – no harm done.
I learned from my late Greek mother-in-law that olives in jars don’t have to go into the fridge either. The liquid that it is steeped in helps to keep the olives as fine and tasty as when plucked off the tree. Refrigerated olives are tasteless in comparison. There is much to be learned from our Mediterranean counter-parts – I tried a ‘village’ recipe once where tomatoes were left to ripen on a wooden board for 2 days in the blazing hot sun. On day 3 the tomatoes were roughly chopped and a few sprinkles of sugar and white wine vinegar was added and left to blaze some more in the sun. This was then added to a Bolognese or a Melanzone. Deliciously worth the wait!
HAPPY COOKING – HAPPY EATING!
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