I don't think I've ever had a potato become moldy. On the rare occasion that they go bad, they just get kind of shrivelly.
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
28 points (100.0% liked)
Cooking
6685 readers
1 users here now
Welcome to LW Cooking, a community for discussing all things related to food and cooking! We want this to be a place for members to feel safe to discuss and share everything they love about the culinary arts. Please feel free to take part and help our community grow!
Taken a nice photo of your creation? We highly encourage sharing with our friends over at !foodporn@lemmy.world.
Posts in this community must be food/cooking related and must have one of the "tags" below in the title.
We would like the use and number of tags to grow organically. For now, feel free to use a tag that isn't listed if you think it makes sense to do so. We are encouraging using tags to help organize and make browsing easier. As time goes on and users get used to tagging, we may be more strict but for now please use your best judgement. We will ask you to add a tag if you forget and we reserve the right to remove posts that aren't tagged after a time.
TAGS:
- [QUESTION] - For questions about cooking.
- [RECIPE} - Share a recipe of your own, or link one.
- [MEME] - Food related meme or funny post.
- [DISCUSSION] - For general culinary discussion.
- [TIP] - Helpful cooking tips.
FORMAT:
[QUESTION] What are your favorite spices to use in soups?
Other Cooking Communities:
!bbq@lemmy.world - Lemmy.world's home for BBQ.
!foodporn@lemmy.world - Showcasing your best culinary creations.
!sousvide@lemmy.world - All things sous vide precision cooking.
!koreanfood@lemmy.world - Celebrating Korean cuisine!
While posting and commenting in this community, you must abide by the Lemmy.World Terms of Service: https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
- Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, ableist, or advocating violence will be removed.
- Be civil: disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally insult others.
- Spam, self promotion, trolling, and bots are not allowed
- Shitposts and memes are allowed until they prove to be a problem.
Failure to follow these guidelines will result in your post/comment being removed and/or more severe actions. All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users. We ask that the users report any comment or post that violates the rules, and to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
If you wait long enough they turn into vodka
I don't think I've ever had them mold/rot on me (unless they were in plastic packaging). They usually start growing before that, and I'll sometimes plant them lol.
I actually just had my first bag of potatoes go bad on me, while others have lasted months. What is the deal with plastic packaging in this situation?
I have no idea, TBH. I've always bought them in bags where they could "breathe", and those all eventually start growing (rather than rotting/going bad) if I forget about them in the pantry for too long. The only ones I've ever bought that were plastic-wrapped were big, baking potatoes. Maybe it keeps them from sprouting for a bit longer?
Eh maybe it's a moisture thing, where locking in the moisture saturates them in their own funk? Cause yeah I'm with ya, I usually buy the mesh bags and they'll keep until they start gaining sentience.
I’d get them in plastic, and try to cut the top side of the bag all open within a few days, and often I get through them all without problems but sometimes not.
I do now have a plastic container I could dump them in that could be an improvement. I’ve thought of cardboard boxes but I imagine spores getting into the cardboard for the next potatoes and maybe moisture from the potatoes being a problem.
My mother kept potatoes in a plastic container in a cabinet, but I don’t know how well they kept or how quickly we used them up.
We grew all kinds of vegetables growing up, and potatoes were one of them. We kept them in a big wooden bin in the cellar and they very rarely, if ever, rotted between seasons. Would use what was left over in the spring for planting (a lot of them were already growing by that point lol).
Moisture is an issue. Dogs knocked their water dish over, and some of it went under the door into the pantry where a bag of potatoes was sitting. I didn't notice it for several days, and those did rot. Rotting releases more moisture which spoils any adjacent, and so forth.
So I guess as long as they stay cool and dry, they're golden. Though once they start sprouting they're less ideal to use for cooking (and difficult to peel, too).
Some may have some spots that look like rot but they're very localized. Never had mold I don't think. Some cut ones had some white on them but that didn't seem to become fuzzy. I don't think I've ever seen potatoes sold in plastic though - unless you mean plastic nets, but I assume you mean like actual plastic bags or something. I empty mine on like a double layered cover of an old fan, so it sits in a big pan of grating basically. No active ventilation though.
Practically impossible to say. You never know how old potatoes you get from the store might be. Maybe a few days, maybe a few weeks. I've had freshly harvested and cleaned potatoes go months before showing new root growth on the outside, but I've had a new bag of potatoes have one or two turn moldy in a few days.
As a child my family would store potatoes in our cellar all winter into the next year where we would plant them again. Staying between 45-50°F, with high humidity, good ventilation, and no light will make them last 6 months or more.
wait. you want high humidity?
We put our save potatoes in a burlap sack and buried them below the frost line. They came out in the spring almost exactly like they went in in the fall.
How did they store them? The only cellar I’ve ever been in was of the house we lived in when I was a little kid, and I remember it as so wet and filled with spiders, and maybe the average cellar isn’t quite like that.
Depends on conditions.
Traditionally potatoes were harvested in fall (just before the first freeze) and stored in a root cellar with stable, cool temps (above about 45) and moderate humidity (IIRC, between 40-60%), and well stacked (good airflow between them, like with straw or even in bushel baskets. I've read storing them in sand is a great way to stabilize moisture loss.
Stored like this they last all winter. They tend to dry out some, get soft and wrinkly, but completely fine to eat.
My root cellar is low humidity and a little warmer, so at 3 months they're a little dry and wrinkly. I've never, ever had mold on potatoes. Mold is a result of high humidity and no air flow.
They do require attention while stored - like other fruits and veg, if one goes bad it'll affect the others.
Interesting. I’d read how vegetables “used to” go in root cellars for winter, but I would just imagine a hole dug in the cellar of the house where I lived as a kid, and vegetables dumped in. I had no idea of stacking or anything.
I live in a desert so extremely low humidity and the pantry area is often over 80. I've used potatoes over a month after buying them many times. I still use them for myself if they have small sprouts. I usually don't see mold until closer to two months in. If I'm cooking for others I'll buy fresh. Our local grocer has a very small selection of produce so I tend to buy a bunch of the nicer ones if I see they've restocked since the next grocery store is about an hour away. When I lived in the city though I'd only buy what I planned on using within the next couple days. More trips but always fresh.
Months. Most of the time the potatoes go Eldritch horror and start looking for soil before they get in any way bad. I've had a few shrivel, but I've never had a moldy potato I had to throw away.
I also don't eat potatoes very often. The ones In buy tend to serve a long sentence.