Seven Foods You Should Not Put In The Fridge

Putting these foods into the fridge won’t cause you any harm; however, it can certainly cause a nuisance for your palate as textures and tastes become ruined. To avoid removing the taste from your food, here are some foods you shouldn’t put into the fridge.

Putting tomatoes in the fridge will stop them from ripening and kill their flavour, placing tomatoes in the fridge changes their chemical structure and reduces the amount of volatiles compounds in the fruit, which affects their flavour. A tomato’s texture and colour can also be affected by cold temperatures and “chilling injuries” caused by temperatures below 5C can  leave the fruit soft and pitted on the surface. 

Putting ripe bananas in the fridge will help them stay ripe for a few days – but if you put them in while they are still a bit green and hard then they won’t ripen at all. Not even after you take them out of the fridge. And their skin will turn black.

Bananas are a tropical fruit and have no natural defence against the cold in their cell walls. These become ruptured by cold temperatures, causing the fruits’ digestive enzymes to leak out of the cells, which is what causes the banana’s skin to turn completely black .

If onions are unpeeled then they need a cool dry storage place with lots of air ventilation, not a cold refrigerator.

the only times onions should go in the fridge is if they are bought peeled or pre-cut, or “when trying to extend the shelf life of sweet or mild onion varieties with high water content”. These, however, need to be kept on a low humidity setting to keep them dry. Onions that have been cut can be kept in a sealed container for up to seven days. 

The refrigerator is “really bad” for bread,  While freezing bread can seriously stall the process that makes bread stale, putting a loaf in the fridge will speed it up. Essentially, the cool temperature causes the starch to crystalize far more rapidly than at room temperature, speeding up the process that makes bread hard and stale.

Putting garlic in the fridge or in plastic bags can make it go mouldy. The best way to store garlic  is to keep it “at room temperature in a dry, dark place that has ample air circulation” with little light to avoid the bulbs sprouting.

Find a 1000 year old jar of honey, and it’ll be as fresh as the day it was put into that jar–honey a naturally preserved food. Putting honey into the fridge will increase the speed of the sugar crystallization which turns it into an almost dough-like form, making for a hard time to scoop out.

I’m not sure if this is classified as a food so much as a food ingredient, but nonetheless, putting oils into the fridge tends to turn them into a stodgy, almost butter-spread-like consistency. This is more common with olive and coconut oils, which tend to solidify at cooler temperatures and take a long time to become liquid again. ( If you do make this mistake, put the oil into the microwave for a quick burst to get the consistency back).