You know the sort of thing. Ripen in the bowl fruit in supermarkets. How to get the inner part ripe before the outer part has gone rotten. So far I have tried RTFM - Instructions - "Place in fruit bowl and leave until ripe" blow torch electric paint stripper hair drier battery acid
Not tried wood burning stove oxy-acetylene torch (I have neither) power washer WD40
Surely someone in here must have cracked it.
No, it;s just a ploy to get you to throw fruit away. IME Tesco fruit has a bowl life of 3 days. Lidl. 1 day!
I take it you've tried bombarding it with gamma rays?
I believe that some fruit can by ripened by exposing them to ethylene, and that this is actually done commercially.
That certainly works for me with fruit from the garden such as apples and tomatoes. My granny used to insist that it had to be a brown paper bag but I suspect anything that traps the natural gases will do.
And talking of natural gases - putting bananas in with the other fruit will accelerate ripening too.
Nick
BTW, the relevant substance is ethylene.
Put them with bananas.
Often unripe fruit sold in supermarkets ends up dry and tasteless. Actually a lot of fruit is quite tasteless because i) it is inbred to look good at the expense of taste ii) it is grown in unsuitable soil and/or climate
Yes, just add a few bananas.
SteveW
I assume that's a joke. And that since you haven't specified which fruit you don't want to solve anything.
NT
Quite. There is much stuff that, in my experience, can go from "too hard to eat" to rotten without passing through edible, in the same way that sublimation misses out the liquid state. ;-)
Chris
And one way the supermarkets stretch the shelf life of fruits is to include an ethylene absorber within the packaging ...
CO2 in a bag maybe? Brian
iii) it is picked long before it's ripe and held in cold storage before being put on the shelves.
I have a particular beef about pears. 'Ready to eat' they claim, and they're harder than unripe apples, and then they rot from the inside so that when the outside suggests they're ripe, you bite into them and they're brown in the middle.
That's the reason I've given up buying plumbs, ripe(ish) on the outside and rotten in the middle.
I note at the moment that there are cherries in supermarkets - mostly rotten, possibly because the high price make them slow mover. My experience with my own cherry tree is that there is a very small window between the fruit being unripe, sweet and nice and starting to split with the rot setting in within hours. I usually have a competition with the local bird population to get to the ripe fruit first. Once past their best the birds ignore the fruit - they must know something!
I find that with oranges smelling the fruit gives some indication of what you may find under the skin. Fruit with no 'orange' smell (especially Satumas/Clementine in the run up to Christmas) or with a musty smell is to be avoided.
The first is most certainly true, the second less so. One of the main reasons for specific fruit varieties in supermarkets is that they can be transported, often for several days or maybe even weeks by sea, with little or no damage. Fruit which is ripe will usually be soft and bruised by movement, or even when stored in more than one layer. Unripe fruit usually won't, but then much unripe fruit will not ripen if picked too early. I gave up buying "ripen in bowl" stuff years ago.
And for this group seems to have missed the obvious
Angle Grinder.
Such as the pears from the trees in our garden.
and
iii) very few people actually know what it *should* taste like.
Yep, next door's pear tree was groaning with fruit this year (45lbs I think she said) they gave me a handful which they were rock hard for ages, I kept feeling the neck for a bit of "give" and ate one, then the rest went brown and too squidgy before I could eat any more.
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