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See why.Food Storage Gadgets
From Beer Savers to Avocado Keepers, we put six new food storage gadgets to the test.
Published Dec. 1, 2013. Appears in Cook's Country December/January 2014, Cook's Country TV Season 7: Old-Fashioned Sunday Suppers
What You Need To Know
Over the years, we’ve used up a lot of plastic bags, plastic wrap, and aluminum foil for the sake of saving a few morsels of food—only to end up tossing browned avocados and other moldering leftovers. So when we noticed a number of gadgets on the market promising to extend life, reduce refrigerator odors, and let us easily spot a range of food and drink in our overstuffed refrigerators—from avocados, to beer, to butter—we crossed our fingers and headed into the test kitchen. We monitored leftovers in these specialty reusable containers for several days. We like to do our bit for the environment, but some were so hard to open that we didn’t want to use them again. In the end, we concluded that three of the six items we tested weren’t worth buying, and a fourth we could recommend only with reservations. But the remaining two items—both from the same company—offered small solutions to small problems and are worth the small investment.
Everything We Tested
Highly Recommended
These silicone bottle caps fit the tops of 12-ounce glass beer and soda bottles. Tough but slightly stretchy, they come in packs of six, 12, or 54. (If you lose the top of a plastic bottle of seltzer or soda, they’ll fit that, too.) Testing was fun: We downed half of a beer, capped the rest, and set it in the refrigerator. The beer was still effervescent the next evening. But don’t wait too long: After 48 hours, the cap blew off one bottle and another beer was left a bit flat.
This square silicone cap fits the end of a butter stick. Its thickness exactly matches 1 tablespoon of butter in a standard-size stick, aiding both storage and usage. It alleviated the mess and guesswork of wrapping the end of a stick of butter and kept the butter from picking up refrigerator flavors for more than a week. Plus, it was tidier than folding the paper or foil liner over the exposed end of the stick.
Recommended with reservations
This small plastic container with a green lid in the shape of half of an avocado kept half of a lime-doused fruit almost completely green for a few hours longer than our usual method (we press plastic wrap on the surface of the citrus-spritzed avocado). It had the advantage of keeping the fruit from getting squashed in a packed refrigerator. The lid was devilishly hard to open.
Not Recommended
This small food storage container uses a stainless-steel disk set within its lid, which “reduces onion odors,” according to the box. But the container worked no better than a plastic zipper-lock bag.
This avocado-shaped piece of hard plastic has a flexible silicone strap that presses down the avocado, but air and oxidation found their way in anyway, turning the edges of the exposed fruit brown within minutes (though the flesh nearest the pit was still green). We got better results pressing a plastic zipper-lock bag against a halved avocado.
These hard plastic cases, in the shape and color of half of a Ruby Red grapefruit, or a whole bell pepper, are designed to call attention to the item being stored (so you don’t forget that it’s in the fridge). But neither preserved the goods any better than plastic bags or wrap did, and they were hard to pry open.
Reviews you can trust
Reviews you can trust
The mission of America’s Test Kitchen Reviews is to find the best equipment and ingredients for the home cook through rigorous, hands-on testing. We stand behind our winners so much that we even put our seal of approval on them.
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