Cleaning Bought Produce

Cleaning Bought Produce

I use 3 parts cold water to 2-3 T white vinegar + 1/4 tsp baking soda (just enough for the “sizzle”).

For this cleaning, I had 2 lbs strawberries, a bag of grapes and 18 oz blueberries.

I put the solution in a large mixing bowl and then filled a colander with fruit and lowered the colander in the solution.

I let it sit maybe 10 minutes, occasionally raising and lowering the colander and swishing it around.

This was the solution after all my fruit soaked in it.

Next I put the colander under running water and thoroughly rinsed the fruit off. I then placed the colander in a mixing bowl of cold, clean water to soak for about 15 mins.

This was my bowl after the cold water soak. Still pretty dirty:

Then I removed the colander and gently shook the colander over the sink to remove as much excess water as I could. I placed this colander over a clean empty mixing bowl to drain for about 20 minutes.

The last step was letting the clean fruit rest on paper towels until completely dry.

Then to store, I placed clean, dry paper towels in labeled (date/item) containers with airtight lids and stored in the refrigerator and freezer. We keep fruit in the freezer for smoothies.

But since we had all this freshly washed fruit, we went ahead and made a batch of smoothies.