cooking @ home

Tired of going for that second half of a sandwich the next day in the fridge and finding it soggy and unappealing? How about opening up that bacon and wondering is that just moisture and condensation or has it turned bad? With one easy tip, you’ll find all of that a thing of the past. You’ll be able to keep bread and pasty items, sloppy sandwiches and breakfast meats fresher and longer in ice box. And all with everyday items in your kitchen, just put together in a slightly different way.

People food shop differently. That said, they can be placed in groups. Some folks shop daily and what they pick up from the market on the way home from work is what they’ll be eating in a couple of hours. No need to worry about freezing fish or putting it in the refrigerator with special care for them. Others buy in weekly jaunts. Some, like me, make the “big food run” every six to eight weeks, and supplement the smaller items — milk, eggs, fresh veggies — with a trip to the convenience store or local produce place. For the latter two groups (probably the majority) keeping things as fresh as possible is required.

Now, if you’re reading thinking either, hey, is he going to sell me something, the answer is no. And if you are instead reading this and saying, you gotta be kidding me, an article on how to wrap things up? What’s he think, we’re morons or something? The answer to that is no as well.

No product, and no one is stupid (and I’m no genius) but … I think, no, make that I know for certain I have by trial and error found a way of keeping things fresher and longer than before that is not so commonly known.

What Microwaving Taught Me

Alton Brown is famous for looking at food and at cooking with scientific eye. (There’s even a T-shirt available on his site that says “Science … It’s what’s for dinner.”) And while I’m in no way as geeky as him (that’s a positive compliment in case you weren’t sure). There is some science that comes involved here. Especially with something as “space aged” as the mysterious microwave.

What’s this have to do with keeping foods? Be patient, grasshopper. Put a bowl of something in the microwave, let’s say, a bowl of string beans from the night before. (Forget lids, they melt). So you’re going to put it in without a lid or with a covering of plastic wrap. Without, and too long, they dry up. With the plastic wrap, they keep their moisture, in fact they steam.

Next, a big bowl of stew to defrost. It won’t get dry either way, but you find after two minutes of nuking (microwaving, that is) it’s still relatively cold throughout. Yet two minutes with plastic wrap and it’s done it’s job. Are you noting these things? You should be. Let’s continue.

If you put a roll in the machine for 20 seconds, it’s hot, but it’s also soggy, on the point of going wet. If I had put the roll in wrapped in plastic it would have been a soaked wet thing you throw out in the trash. If you put the same roll in while wrapped loosely with a paper towel, nuke one side 10 seconds, flip and then another 8-10 seconds on that side, you have a perfectly delightful warmed up roll. In fact it almost feels as fresh as though it were taken out of the oven.

Noticing a pattern yet? Eventually, I did. And applied these to wrapping up food that would go in the refrigerator, and found some wonderful results.

Perfect Marriage of Paper and Aluminum

Let’s go to basics. A sandwich. Not even tomato on it. Ham on cheese with mustard on rye. You eat half of it and decide that’s enough, you’ll wrap it up and eat the other half later. Very common household thing. You take out the plastic wrap, put it away, take it out a day or two later and it’s all mushy. For some reason though you keep doing this, cause hey, that’s what plastic wrap is for, right?

Maybe one day you decide ok, aluminum foil, maybe that will give you a better result. Two days later, you open it up. It’s better in some ways. Maybe. It’s a little mushy, but not as mushy. But the bread is now somehow mushy and hard/stale at the same time.

So we take a lesson from microwaving. Breads and pasty have water in them. Paper towels absorb. Plastic wrap holds in and even brings out moisture. Add one more thing in (since you can’t use this in a microwave), aluminum foil will hold comparatively less moisture than plactic wrap does.

So, breads, sandwiches, even “runny” sandwiches (with lots of oil or mayo and tomatoes, onions, etc) wrap first in a paper towel and then in aluminum foil. And you know what you get? Two even three days later a sandwich that tastes like it was JUST made. I kid you not! The roll is not stale, nor is it soggy. The contents of the sandwich hasn’t bothered it either.

Bacon and also ham breakfast slices. You see them in the plastic they came in, or you put them in new plastic wrap, and you look at them and they often look at first slimy, because moisture has mixed with oil in the case of the bacon, or the ham which already has a great deal of oil exudes more. These are usually fine, but they don’t look good. Be sure. Again, the paper towel and aluminium foil method of wrapping these and storing these in the fridge is just amazing. Good bacon and ham, you open it up and it appears totally fresh as it should. And if either of these are going, there’s no more guessing is it the water from plastic or not.

Simple, right? Totally. And yet, this combination took me a while to figure out, and there’s good chance you’ve never tried it before. Please, do yourself a favor, try this. It sounds like a silly tip probably, but when you see the results — which cost you nothing — you will be so flipped by it, you’ll think — like I did — that you just discovered something seemingly momentous.

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