Science behind keeping tomatoes out of the fridge
By Julie R. Thomson, Huffington Post
By now you’ve probably been told a million times that you should never put tomatoes in the refrigerator. But aside from knowing they’ll get soggy and taste a little worse for the wear, do you really know why? We’re about to get to the bottom of why you should really store tomatoes on the counter.
Tomatoes originate from warm, desert-like climates, so they prefer to be hot. Tomatoes stored in the fridge aren’t just unhappy, they undergo a chemical change that weakens their flavor and alters their texture.
The beloved tomato taste — that deep, grassy flavor — is the result of aroma volatile compounds. Refrigeration not onlystops the production of new aroma volatiles, but it also deteriorates already existing ones, a study from French National Institute for Agricultural Research proved.