One Of The Best Ways To Store Bananas Will Keep Them Fresher For Longer

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Bananas can be used for both scientific and nourishing purposes. For instance, you can use ripening bananas for a science fair project and use overripe bananas in smoothies, pancakes, breads, and other baked goods as an egg replacement. If you just want to eat the fruit as a snack, though, you may prefer a texture that's not too mushy and ripe. One of the best options to keep newly purchased bananas fresh as long as possible is to hang them up.

Before getting into hanging bananas, let's talk about two main reasons why bananas deteriorate so quickly once you get them home. Perhaps you've noticed that the underneath sides of the bananas sitting at the bottom of your fruit bowl have more dark spots. Some of those spots are bruises caused by the pressure that the other fruits are putting on them. However, the fruit can also develop similar bruising just from sitting on the counter. Unfortunately, this kind of damage releases ethylene gas.

Bananas already make ethylene gas in much larger amounts than most other fruits, and the bruising just makes it worse, accelerating enzymatic browning and ripening. These chemical processes of oxidation occur on bananas when the enzyme polyphenol oxidase interacts with oxygen, making the peel turn brown and the flesh softer and sweeter as it breaks down naturally occurring acids. Meanwhile, the ethylene gas becomes trapped when bananas rest on a surface or under other fruit, accelerating the aging process further. Believe it not, hanging bananas on a stand or hook — such as the Blue Donuts chrome stand or Cinksy foldable, under-cabinet banana hook — is actually one of the best ways to slow the ripening process.

The first way that a mountable hook or countertop stand helps with keeping your bananas fresher for longer is kind of obvious. It keeps the fruit from sitting on a hard surface or at the bottom of a fruit bowl where the skin can be easily bruised and damaged. On top of that, it prevents the ethylene gas produced by the fruit from getting trapped and accelerating the ripening process. That's because there's more airflow around the bananas as they hang, allowing the gas to disperse naturally.

Since heat, humidity, and sunlight also speed up the ripening process, choose a dry, cool place away from sunlight to place your hanging device. That place could be inside your pantry or a cabinet as long as there's still plenty of airflow. Speaking of good airflow, you could even put the banana stand or hook underneath a ceiling fan to blow away the gas before it has time to do its worst. As an added bonus, you can further slow the effects of ethylene gas by wrapping the fruit stems. That's actually the primary place where the gas is produced and why some grocers wrap the stems, preventing the gas from reaching the rest of the fruit.