Does This Strawberry Mason Jar Hack Really Work?
We all know about TikTok, the land of weird food and lifestyle hacks that surprisingly work. Only a few months ago, a TikToker enlightened the world about the colony of bugs that live inside a strawberry, per Newshub. Soak the strawberries in a bowl of salted water, the hack suggested, and 10 minutes later a bunch of worms will swim out to the surface. The whole world watched aghast at the number of bugs we had been eating along with our strawberries up until now.
The next strawberry hack is a little less alarming and comes from a 36-year-old woman on Facebook. Kris Potter shared a picture of a batch of fresh strawberries that she bought at the store. Instead of storing them in the box that the berries came in, Potter stored them in a mason jar. The plump-looking strawberries, she promises, are over three weeks old! "These ones, no word of a lie, are over 3 weeks old," she wrote. "From the superstore. I'm lucky if I get them to last 5 days before they start to turn when I buy them from there."
The hack clearly made waves among Facebook users, and the post has 33,000 like and 55,000 comments to date. A user on TikTok tried the hack and found that the strawberries do indeed stay fresh for about two to three weeks when stored in a mason jar (via The Sun). So, the question is, does the hack really work?
This hack might be the best way to store strawberries
As with any game-changing hack found on social media, fellow strawberry enthusiasts raced to grocery stores to buy a batch of strawberries and put this hack to careful test. After thorough scrutiny and an expansive methodology, Food Folk and Fun found the mason jar hack to be the "clear winner" as opposed to storing strawberries in the containers that they come in or giving them a vinegar wash. While the vinegar wash keeps strawberries fresh for a week or two, mason jars can keep them fresh for another week on top.
Taste Of Home found that storing unwashed strawberries in an airtight glass jar, aka a mason jar, was the best amongst six other methods of storing strawberries. The only thing to keep in mind is to cut any damaged or squishy parts out but leave the stems and leaves intact, place them loosely in the jar so that they're not pressing into each other, and leave the strawberries unwashed. The latter is crucial to keep external moisture away. Not only did the strawberries look fresh and plump, but they even tasted so!