[Phillip Beall]

All,

I love keeping our forums content fresh.  LOL  I have had this piece open just waiting for a chance to post it.  Since this is the General Ragchew area and since I thought this Cooking New York Times piece – Do I Need to Refrigerate Ketchup? An A-to-Z Guide to Storing Condiments – was quite educational; I decided to post it here and now!

Entertaining quotes from that article:

You keep mustard in the fridge, but your partner (or roommate or dad) balks at the idea. Who’s right? The fine print on the bottle, on nearly all of the bottles — “refrigerate after opening” — isn’t much help.

Turns out, that urging is rarely about health risks and more about quality, said Abby Snyder, the associate professor of microbial food safety at Cornell University.

And then this:

So do you even need to refrigerate? “A good rule of thumb: If you bought it from the refrigerated section at the store, it should stay in the fridge at home,” said Carla Schwan, the director of the National Center for Home Food Preservation at the University of Georgia.

Ahhhhh, but what about butter?  LOL  In a June 4, 2023 forum post I made – The Battle Over Refrigerating Butter: ‘Enough Is Enough’ – from that Wall Street Journal piece they said “In 2015, Ms. Mertzel sent samples of four brands of butter to a lab for testing. The finding: No sign of spoilage after three weeks of storage at 68 to 77 degrees Fahrenheit. She commissioned a similar analysis this year and found no spoilage after 30 days.”

If you missed that article I suggest you click the The Battle Over Refrigerating Butter: ‘Enough Is Enough’ link above and then click the article link. Kathy and I now freeze butter for long-term storage, we refrigerate it for “prior to use” and then we take a stick out and leave it out.  It just spreads so much more easily!

As was recently pointed out, preparedness and being a prepper have a nexus to ham radio.  And even a ham that doesn’t consider themselves a prepper; even they might find those two pieces educational.  Enjoy!

73

Phillip Beall (W5EBC)

[Author]

Posts