Guide
Why your apples go mealy
It’s the fridge door, not the apple.
Mealy is water loss
The crunch in an apple is water held under pressure inside each cell. Lose the water and the cells collapse. What’s left is soft and dry and tastes of very little, even though nothing has actually gone wrong with it.
The door is the worst place in the fridge
It’s the warmest shelf, it swings into a warm kitchen several times a day, and it’s dry. Apples want cold and damp. The bottom of the crisper drawer is where they belong.
Give them a bag with holes in it
A loose bag holds humidity around the fruit without sealing it in. A sealed bag makes them sweat, and sweating is how they rot instead.
They ripen everything near them
Apples give off ethylene. Left in a bowl with softer fruit, they push all of it forward by days.
Where we come into it.
Apples are part of the everyday base, bought loose on Saturday morning rather than pulled out of long storage. Put them straight into the drawer and they’ll still be crisp when the next box arrives.
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