"Getting rid of everything that doesn’t matter allows you to remember who you are. Simplicity doesn’t change who you are, it brings you back to who you are."

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Storing Eating Apples

We don't have a basement or root cellar here.  The best I can do is store potatoes, onions and apples out in the garage.  That's assuming of course that the weather has turned cool enough that things won't rot.  If it's still warm, into the fridge they go.

Last year I was curious about how to store eating apples.  (You can only keep them in a fridge so long and the lack of humidity wrinkles the skins up.  Yuck.)  I'd read that you could wrap them individually in newspaper.  The trick was to not let the apples touch each other.  Has anyone tried this technique?  

Since I don't have newspapers laying around I used old bath towels instead.  It worked pretty well last year, so I thought I'd do it the same way this year.  I'd kept some of the sturdier boxes for this purpose.  I took an empty box and laid a towel inside it.  I went through my bushel of apples separating the pristine from the bruised and skin damaged ones.  I was basically "grading" the apples into "use first / use last".


The best apples were put on the bottom keeping enough room between them so they wouldn't touch.  Toss the towel on top of that row and layer them as you go.  Easy.


The towels also helped prevent the apples from freezing.  I keep them in the garage but beside the door that enters into the house.  Last year they kept this way well into December.  Nice and crisp.  Not sure how well they would have stored into January or later as we had simply eaten them up by that time.


Still, I thought I'd toss this out there.  This worked well for me.  Do any of you store fresh eating apples?  How do you do it?

4 comments:

  1. I've never tried it but I have seen the newspaper thing. I may try your towel solution. We love apples too!

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  2. I've been wondering about storing apples too, though it will be a few years before our trees are big enough to produce. And I have the same climate problem as you, the temp doesn't always cooperate! I too have heard about the newspaper. I know from experience that newspaper works very well to store sweet potatoes.

    How to Store Your Garden Produce just says the apples should not be touching, which newspaper can do, but so can just spacing them. I think then, your idea sounds very good. Do give us apple storage progress reports from time to time!

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  3. I think hubby's beer drinking has finally comes in handy---I'll bet the dividers between the bottles would do a good job of keeping the apples away from each other. This is a neat post-I'll be checking back in to see how well yours hold up!!

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  4. Love how you've done this. It's too humid here to store apples outside.

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