Knowing Temperature Zones of a Fridge for Food Storage

Series Summary

Food storage is both a traditional household and important industrial skill. Food is stored by almost every human society and by many animals. The storage of food has several primary purposes, including preparation for scarcity or famine, taking advantage of short term surpluses of food, planning a more balanced diet throughout the year, planning for special events, and preparing for an emergency. Storing food at home can also be beneficial in that it helps people to save a lot of money on food that otherwise may go wasted.

So, you know why you should store food, but perhaps you don't know how. In this free video series, our expert will show you how to package, freeze, and refrigerate a number of staple foods to keep you from wasting leftovers. You'll learn how to keep meat from spoiling, keep fruits from becoming rotten, and keep vegetables crisp and fresh. Whether its soups and stews or ripened fruits, our expert has the answer when it comes to food storage.

Video Transcript

"Hi, Christi Ferretti here from Expert Village. Your refrigerator may not be quite as big as mine, but a lot of the same concepts do apply. What you may not realize is that the temperature in your refrigerator can vary anywhere from thirty-five degrees all the way up to 59. Now, a safe handling temperature for food is forty degrees. So fifty-nine can be a little scary, but it is safe if you put the proper things in the right place in the refrigerator. So, for that fifty-nine degree area - which is going to be the door of your fridge. You're going to want to store things like mustards, ketchups, fruit juices, and things like that. Avoid putting milk or dairy products. Now the one exception here is going to be your eggs and your butter. If the top part of your refrigerator door has a closing plastic lid, that's going to hold that temperature in. So that’s ok. Hot air rises. We all realize that, so the warmest part of your fridge is going to be on top. We're going to talk in a minute about which things should go where. The coldest part of your fridge is going to be that bottom shelf, just above your doors and that's going to be for storing meats. Well, get into that a little bit later as well. One of the key points that many people may not realize is over stuffing your refrigerator can really cause a lot of problems. In order to keep things cold in there, it's really based on circulation. If you stuff things in too compactly, you're not going to be able to get that circulation needed. So the items kept in the middle of your fridge may not be kept at that forty degree mark or below. That's going to turn into basically spoilage and a lot of wasted money and a lot of headaches on your part. So stay with me. We'll talk about where to store things in the fridge."