Carrots in Cold Storage: An Experiment

Question

How long will carrots keep in the refrigerator and still be edible?


Background

Carrots started showing up in the CSA shares starting in December of last year. For several months, we got carrots every single week. The bunches were good-sized so it wasn't a surprise that I got behind on eating them. Cutting the greens off and keeping them wrapped up in a plastic bag in the produce drawer seemed to extend their life so I wasn't faced with the problem of tossing limp carrots into the compost pile regularly.

I didn't get around to preserving any. I don't particularly like pickled carrots except in combination with something else: sauerkraut, kimchi, pickled peppers, and so on. I haven't tried canning them because that would require using the pressure canner; quite frankly, this winter I just didn't have the energy to do that, especially with the chance of failure since I'm not experienced with pressure canning. And, I don't particularly like commercially canned carrots so my gut feeling was that I wouldn't like them done at home either. I could have dried some carrots but again, it seemed like a whole lot of work.

At some point (and I can't find the original post), Sharon talked about her efforts to store carrots over time without a root cellar. She'd been unhappy with some methods and had finally, if I remember right, resorted to just tossing them in an ice chest on her porch. That way, there was no digging through wet sand to check on them regularly. Someone else piped up in the comments, or in their own blog post, that they were also experimenting with ways to store carrots.


Method

As the bags of carrots piled up in the refrigerator, I decided to try an experiment. So far, I had successfully kept carrots for several weeks with no loss in flavor or texture. Could they be stored longer, much longer?

Well, only one way to find out. You might recall that we had a second refrigerator that we sometimes used in our garage. It was kept at the warmest temperature setting possible to use the least amount of energy. I took two bunches of carrots with the greens cut off, closed them up tight in a plastic grocery bags, and tucked them into a produce drawer with the humidity set for low. I made sure the carrots were nice and dry before storing them.


Experiment In Progress

The carrots sat there for weeks. When retrieving other things from the refrigerator, I'd peek at the bag to see if it looked like the carrots were rotting. Week after week, they looked fine. Finally, the flow of carrots slowed at the CSA and I began pinching a carrot occasionally from my bag. Amazingly, they were in fine shape.

When I loaded them in the ice chest for the move to our new place, I noticed that some were starting to sprout from the top. Lately, I'd been noticing more and more of this sprouting, as well as some white root hairs along the length of some of them. Could this be due to the length of time the carrots were stored? Or, maybe the sunnier conditions of this time of year impacted them each time the refrigerator, now in the house rather than in a dark garage, was opened.


Results

It was time to conclude the experiment. I decided today would be a good time to salvage what I could. I had no idea whether a carrot with several inches of greenery sprouting from the top and white roots going to town would be any good to eat. Would they be bitter? Rotten? Woody?

Keeping them dry and enclosed in a bag (not perforated) seems to be important. Where a little moisture got in, one carrot did have a soggy tip that I cut off. All were easy to peel and didn't seem to have developed a really woody core.


If there's more green than you want in the center, or if it's gotten a little woody (these weren't bad), you can peel out the center and toss it to the dogs.


They looked like carrots after peeling and trimming. The real key would be the taste test. I planned to roast the carrots, all of them, to bring out their natural sweetness. Before putting them through the food processor, though (no time to cut by hand today), I would taste a bite from each one.

I ate a lot of carrot today. I was pleasantly surprised. Only one, out of all of them, was bitter and went directly into the compost bin. The rest were fine. Not as sweet as when they were fresh out of the ground, in most cases, but still full of carrot flavor. And there were a few with some noticeable sweetness left.


After roasting, the carrot flavor was more pronounced with that nice hint of additional sweetness. I'll be using some of them tonight in burrito filling but most will go in the freezer. Carrots won't figure prominently in the CSA shares again for months so I'll have to adapt to using frozen, roasted ones. Next year, perhaps I'll be set up to do some solar dehydrating.


Conclusions

I don't recall exactly when I put these carrots in the refrigerator. Based on when we started getting them, though, I'm pretty sure that I started this experiment towards the end of January. After almost four months in the refrigerator, the carrots were still edible. Tasty, even. If you have the space and do not have other cool storage options, this is one way you can store carrots for a few extra months.