Strawberries

Strawberries keep 3–7 days refrigerated and are the most fragile berry in the punnet. Do not wash them until you eat them.

Store them unwashed in a shallow ventilated container lined with paper towel, in the fridge. Do not pile them deep — the weight bruises the lower fruit, and released juice feeds mold.

Leave the green hulls on until you eat them. Removing the calyx opens a wound in a very high-moisture fruit and shortens its life considerably.

Sort them as soon as you get home and remove any that are bruised or soft. A single moldy berry will take the container within a day.

A dilute vinegar rinse followed by very thorough drying does extend their life. The drying is the part people skip and the part that matters.

Strawberries freeze well for 8–12 months. Hull them, freeze on a tray, then bag.

Strawberries are unusually vulnerable even by berry standards, and it comes down to their anatomy.

Botanically the strawberry is not a berry at all — the fleshy part is an enlarged receptacle, and the little "seeds" on the outside are the actual fruits. That means the soft, edible tissue is externally exposed rather than protected inside a skin. There is essentially no cuticle, no wax layer, and no barrier of any kind.

Combine that with roughly 91% water content and a soft cellular structure, and you have a fruit that bruises if you look at it and that provides an open surface for Botrytis cinerea, gray mold, to colonize. Botrytis is present on the fruit at harvest and simply waits; it grows at refrigerator temperature, and it spreads by direct contact between adjacent berries.

This is also why washing in advance is so damaging: strawberries absorb water rapidly through that unprotected surface, becoming waterlogged, and the residual surface moisture is exactly what mold needs.

Discard moldy strawberries entirely rather than cutting the spot away — USDA guidance for high-moisture soft fruit — along with any berries in contact with them.

White or green shoulders are simply underripeness, and darkening to deep red with soft flesh is over-ripeness rather than spoilage.