Ripening Fruit In A Paper Bag
Posted on June 06, 2018 by
It can sometimes be difficult to find fruit that’s perfectly ripe and ready to eat. The paper bag method sounds like an old wife tale but is in fact incredibly effective for speeding up the process.
Placing unripe fruit into a brown paper bag actually does help the fruit to ripen faster. As fruit ripens, a hormone called ethylene is produced and emitted as a gas. By wrapping your fruit in the bag, this traps the ethylene around the fruit and makes the process a bit quicker.
Even Faster Ripening
You can generally speed up the process even more by adding more fruit to the bag as it inevitably produces more ethylene. You can use a mixture of fruit for this too if you have a range of fruits that you need to ripen quickly.
Fruits that work best:
- Apples
- Pears
- Bananas
- Avocados
Stopping Ripening
It’s important that you remove fruit from the bag when it becomes ripe so that you don’t end up with over ripe fruit. Once you’ve got perfectly ripe fruit, you can place it in the fridge to make it last a little longer.