Home: Cool advice on getting the best from your fridge

It's possibly your only always-on appliance, but how well do you really know your refrigerator?

As seen on The Home Edit, Netflix, these iDesign pull-out drawer-style fridge boxes contain a removable divider to let you sort small jars, snacks, fruit cups, individual yoghurts and more. Integrated handles make it easy to grab and go. Measure up the fridge before you order; from €26.99 at organisedstore.ie.

Fridges. We treat them as big, dopey, cooling wardrobes. Blithely throwing food in there at the end of a week of Ben-Hur dashes around the supermarket, it’s predictable chaos by Friday night. We all know that sour-scented tangle of drinks, condiments, meat, veg and leftovers. Your teenager treats the appliance as a soft, soothing night light — making a leisurely 20-minute phone call as they stir through the mangled foodstuffs and containers. Top shelves become a place of eerie mystery, while orphaned, expensive buys moulder. Over 49kg per person of all the foodstuffs we buy in Ireland is flung out uneaten — 1.1m tonnes a year, at a monetary loss of €700 per household (EPA, October 2022).

The new technologies around cooling appliances focus on two of our major failings in handling our fridges and their ballast — a lack of meal planning and placing the foodstuffs in the wrong parts of the cavity for its type. The level of push-notification and constant connection to an expensive appliance dissolves into comedy, in my view. But you could in a world of sheer luxury pay up to €7,300 for a fully loaded super fridge/freezer purring information into your hand-held device night and day.

Siemens’ latest “Home-Connected” models allow you to keep an inventory of the contents of your cooling appliances together with the expiry dates. This means that shuffling along the aisles at Tesco or Lidl, you can instantly refer to the list, and the available fresh food at home, and be promoted into meal suggestions. You’ll never again dump a heap of chorizo into a pan, and then realise it’s ten days past due, and can poke down cooling temperatures prone on a beach in Lanzarote.

Additionally, the Siemens iSensoric and Multiairflow detailing provides hyper-cool areas for certain foodstuffs and an internal flow system that circulates the air evenly in the refrigerator. Even if you rudely over-hand the items onto the top or bottom racks, fresh food quality is preserved better.

Curate your fridge door with these water carafes from Eva Solo, from €32-€40, cookinglife.ie and multiple suppliers.

Progressive information tools can certainly sharpen up your storage failings, but there’s a lot of room for better manual, intelligent input with a much cheaper fridge. Designated, cooling-zones (drawered) which manage both temperature and humidity (influencing flavour, vitamin and nutrient survival) are available in moderately priced fridges. Keeping meat at a safe temperature straight out of the car with rapid cooling, and teasing lettuce to perfect crispness for a couple of weeks, these improvements are chill, worthy and common inclusions. In the more expensive models, you can dip a drawer down swiftly to -2C to store fresh fish for longer.

With your own vintage fridge in mind, and a determination to do better, let’s store our foods the way the fridge maker intended. Corralling and identifying is the guiding light of cool storage. We’re aiming to fill the fridge by around three-quarters of its capacity while allowing cool air to circulate. Start on the bottom shelf, usually the coolest part of your fridge, therefore an ideal spot for foodstuffs like raw meat. Always strive to keep raw and cooked foods apart. Using the bottom area also reduces the chance of dripping juices hitting other foods. Keep meat and fish in a container with a lid to guard against cross-contamination.

Keep all foodstuffs off the back surface of the fridge, as they can cold-burn and spoil.

If you have salad drawers, use dedicated container boxes devoted to the food type. Don’t keep your vegetables and fruits in any packaging they came in, as they will sweat. If there’s a humidity slider on the unit, follow the maker’s instructions to “crisp” vegetables like lettuce during storage.

Shelf life

Don’t neglect to clean out the drawers which can gather bacteria-rich puddles of moisture from decaying or wet foodstuffs. Some vegetables and fruits release gases that will cause everything around it to decay more quickly. Find a cool spot out of the fridge for bananas, pineapple, avocados and tomatoes. Utilise any corrugated tray to keep moisture away from the fresh food or line the bins with clean tea towels.

The middle shelves usually have a consistent middling temperature with few fluctuations. They are perfect for dairy foods including milk, yoghurt, eggs, cream and butter, as they are within easy reach and floated up and away from raw carnivorous foodstuffs on the bottom shelf. Here and on higher shelves, you can use both containers and a turntable to bring food to the front of the cabinet for viewing; Storage Master turntable plates from €4.99 at Homestore and more. Look up the Lababe Egg Scroller on eBay to palm your eggs effortlessly from the dairy shelf; from €20, amazon.co.uk.

Right up top is the warmest place in an older fridge without balanced cooling. It can be used for cooked foods and leftovers in terms of temperature, but remind yourself of their presence or in a fridge-over-freezer model, they may turn into more forgotten ingredients and ultimately — needless waste. Create a ready-to-eat area up top, checking first before you go for new foodstuffs recently imported to the fridge. Use labels to ID what this and other shelves are for, and bring short-term items to the front.

The fridge door, because it swings out into the room and is at the front of the cabinet, is hit by more light than any other surface, will be relatively warm and experiences the greatest fluctuation in temperature. It’s fine for milk, juice, condiments like ketchup and pickles, and open jars within their date after opening. Think about open containers that are quickly used up to keep in the door. Use the door more efficiently by fitting it out tightly with small upright terraced boxes to gather goods and keep the shelves cleaner. Measure up the shelf and look for bargain buys at any euro store.

Invest in some Mason-style preserving jars with rubber seals and hinged closures. Cut up a few left-over raw vegetables and you can plan some takeaway healthy salad lunches over the course of a full week.

Divide and conquer

To seriously micromanage and save on waste, introduce BPA-free plastic containers that can do multiple duties in the fridge, microwave, freezer and pantry. Investing in an arsenal of transparent containers for every area of the fridge can raise it to the level of a cool superstore. The vertical area above most shelves in any fridge is generally not used to the max’. Stacking containers in plastic or glass can create 50% more room and divide and conquer so that you can glance into the fridge and immediately see what you have and how much you have of your foodstuffs. Budget boxes from €4.99, homestoreandmore.ie. 

Suspend shallow boxes on a sliding mechanism from the underside of the next shelf up to fill that void; from €18, sklum.com. For quality buys with internal baskets check the FreshKeepers, Interdesign and Progressive boxes to carry everything from soda cans and wine bottles; from €10-€33 with or without lids, at organisedstore.ie.

King of the food bins to my mind is the Oxo GreenSaver range. It has a replaceable carbon filter that traps and absorbs ethylene gas, an elevated colander which sits inside but separate from the container walls, promoting airflow and an adjustable vent for setting the optimum humidity level for any foodstuff; from €22, Amazon. M&S does a similar box in acrylic resin with a colander interior, drainers and valves, sans the carbon insert, from €10. It can pop directly into the dishwasher on fridge-cleaning days.

However you store your foodstuffs, every three months or so clean the entire cabinet out entirely, giving every element including all storage boxes a warm soapy wash. Otherwise, your cooling appliance will merrily breed salmonella, listeria and E.coli. If you have a spill involving raw meat or poultry, clean the entire fridge out if possible. Baking soda is a good cleaner/disinfectant and can be used on a cloth to drive dirt out of the seals’ corners. Don’t put warm food in the fridge. Even with a fast-cool function, where possible, allow hot foodstuffs to cool first.