Yesterday I found a sale in which I could buy two pounds of strawberries for the price you'd normally pay for one pound. I rarely buy two pounds of anything fresh, because I live alone. How many strawberries can I eat before they go bad? Yeah, that's a personal problem, but the more useful question is, how can I store them to make them last long enough to justify the purchase? Food vendors will tell you to eat fresh strawberries in 3-5 days, but I'd like to make them last an entire week.
The obvious answer is to freeze some of them. But this really requires a plan to use them in the future. Will you commit to making a strawberry dessert with them? I won't because I'd have to eat the whole thing myself, but I am open to using them for smoothies. This makes it all the more important to flash-freeze the strawberries separately before storing them together, so you can take out only as many as you need.
As far as storing fresh strawberries for eating, you will find all kinds of advice, but which method is best? Jesse Szewczyk at The Kitchn gathered seven different methods and tested them, using a batch of strawberries that were all purchased together. Each storage method was left in a refrigerator for a week, and the results ranked by the percentage of strawberries that were unusable after seven days. In other words, a lot of strawberries were sacrificed to the compost bin to help us enjoy more of them. The top method requires a little work, but the second best is darn easy and yields comparable results. You can read about them all at The Kitchn.
(Image credit: Leo Johannes)
