One minute bananas are green when you pick them off the supermarket shelf, and the next it seems like they've almost turned to mush.
Normally, you'd keep them in a fruit bowl on a table or a kitchen counter, but if you want your bananas to stay that perfect yellow colour for longer, an expert has recommended a different way of storing them.
Mike from Kitchen Tips Online experimented with two bunches of bananas to see which storage hack was most effective.
He placed one of the bunches on his kitchen counter, and the other inside an airtight container on his kitchen counter.
Did you know that bananas produce ethylene gas which helps ripen the fruit? That means every time a banana is torn from the bunch, ethylene gas emits from the stem.
This is why having other fruits in the bowl with bananas can cause other fruits to rapidly ripen.
One way to store bananas to slow down the ripening process is by wrapping cling film around the stems to trap the ethylene gas, and the most effective method is to wrap the stems of individual bananas instead of wrapping all of the stems together.
By wrapping these individual stems, there are fewer places for the ethylene gas to leak out because the stems are covered - and this means that the bananas will ripen more slowly.
You can also use ethylene absorption balls, as they extend the shelf life of fruits and vegetables by removing the gas through an oxidation process, thereby ensuring the quality of freshness of the produce.
Mike placed an ethylene absorption ball inside the air-tight container with the second bunch of bananas and it was nearly a week before he noticed a "significant difference" between the two bunches.
The bananas on the counter were "significantly softer than the ones in the container."
By day 15, there was still "a little bit of green" on the bananas in the airtight container with the ethylene absorption balls, reports the Express.
When a banana was cut open, there was a "little bit of bruising" but the fruit was "still edible."
This means that bananas can last a lot longer using these methods, as often they go off within days when you just leave them in the fruit bowl.
Would you try this method to keep bananas fresher for longer? Let us know in the comments.
