To chill or not to chill is a perennial question, with everything from ketchup to eggs, bread to jam and tomatoes to salad cream subject to strongly held opinions. Even scientists don’t always know where they stand on this debate, with the Food Standards Agency recently reversing its advice about keeping potatoes out of the fridge. For years it was believed that chilling them would lead to the production of acrylamide, a chemical that is thought to increase the risk of cancer. Now, it turns out, putting them in the fridge is perfectly safe.
This is because the more items you have in your fridge, the less the cooling mechanism has to work. The foods themselves become cold and act as coolants, keeping everything around them chilled. If your fridge is looking a bit empty, experts suggest storing a few jugs full of cold water inside to keep the ambient temperature down. But this doesn’t mean stuffing it so full that something falls out every time you open the door.
Unopened nuts have a long shelf life, but as soon as you tear open that packet of peanuts, they start to rot. To prevent this, nuts should be kept in the fridge. The same is also true of flour, especially wholegrain or coconut, which should be refrigerated to stop the oil in them from oxidising and causing them to spoil. Some experts recommend freezing flour for a week after you buy it to kill off weevil eggs, laid by bugs which live in dry goods.
