Who can abandon the sweet mandarins during the New Year's festivities, and throughout the year as a whole? If you relate yourself to resourceful people and prefer to buy products in large amounts for storage, instead of multiple visits to the market, the first question before you will be how to store tangerines at home. For him, we are planning to give a detailed answer in this material.
How to properly store tangerines at home: varieties
During the purchase of mandarin, first of all you should pay attention to the fruit variety, which is easy to determine based on external characteristics. It is the variety that initially will determine how long mandarins can be fresh.
The longest kept are Abkhazian mandarins of medium size with a yellow or yellow-orange peel of medium thickness. Together with them for storage, purchase from fruits from Morocco differing in small size and skin with pronounced porosity. The Turkish mandarins with pits, smooth skin with a yellowish tinge, and juicy, large and sweet tangerines from Spain are more prone to spoilage.
We do not recommend buying unripened greenish fruits, however attractive the prospect of their long-term preservation seemed to be. In fact, at home, not allowing to maintain a proper level of humidity, mandarins are ripe wrong, they will develop a bad taste and reduce the content of useful substances .
Having dealt with the initial stages, let's look at the specific points about how long to keep tangerines at home.
How and where is it better to store tangerines at home?
The main indicators that should be observed when storing fruits are humidity and temperature. A properly selected level of humidity (of the order of 80%) will allow the fruits to retain their juiciness and not dry during storage. If you do not know how to store tangerines, or rather at what temperature they remain fresh for a long time, then remember that the optimum lies within + 4- + 8 degrees Celsius. At room temperature, citrus fruits are stored as elevated temperatures accelerate the spoilage of foods, causing fermentation, and prolonging mandarins life for a period of about a week.
Before placing the tangerines for storage, make sure the integrity of each of the fruits, as the rotten skin of one fruit can spoil all the stocks. After examining, spread the fruits on perforated boxes in 2-3 layers, no more, laying each of the layers with kraft paper. It is also possible to increase the storage period by firstly wiping each of the citrus fruits with a drop of vegetable oil.
The question of how to store tangerines in a refrigerator is advisable, as many modern refrigerating chambers allow maintaining a constant level of humidity and temperature. In this case, all the same rules apply: store whole
And finally, if you still decide to purchase green mandarins, then remember that the moisture level for them should be slightly higher than for ripened fruit - 90%, and the storage temperature is lower - + 2 - 3 degrees.