I Asked a Chef to Help Me Organize My Fridge, and Here’s What He Said
As a food writer, there’s often a lot going on in my fridge. I might be meal-prepping or testing recipes, but as a single woman who lives in a tiny studio apartment, I don’t have a lot of surface area for how densely packed my fridge may be on a given week or day. Whether it’s the day of a shopping trip or after I have come home with some leftovers from a tasting dinner — there’s often a lot going on in there, and it’s often not organized most effectively.
While basic FDA food safety guidelines say to keep fruits and veggies in the crisper drawer because that portion of the fridge will “provide an optimal storage environment for fruits and vegetables,” there are not a lot of recommendations outside of that. For that reason, my fridge was basically organized using the concept of not where things belong but, to be more concise about it, simply what fits where. And that sometimes led to arbitrary choices that turned out were not ideal from a food safety standpoint.
For this productive and effective organization, I turned to the type of expert who’d know all about making the most out of the contents of the fridge, as far as using ingredients more effectively: a professional chef. Here’s what Trung Vu, chef-instructor of pastry and baking arts at the Institute of Culinary Education’s New York City campus, recommended.
Organize from top to bottom.
When I sent some photos of my fridge’s current state of disarray, Vu assured me that there were some easy and quick improvements we could make to the organization of the refrigerator. The goal in this case was organizing from a food safety standpoint. “As a chef, food safety is paramount and something important to consider is that accidents can happen and foods can get knocked over or spilled in the refrigerator,” Vu says.
What I had never realized is that while I always assumed the smartest way to organize a fridge was to make what we use the most easily accessible, that’s not what the qualifier should be. It’s all about organizing by cooking temperature. “In a professional kitchen, foods are arranged from top to bottom with foods requiring higher cooking temperatures placed lower,” Vu says.
Be mindful of food safety.
In the original state of my fridge, I had raw chicken wings I was defrosting for that night’s dinner on a top shelf, just randomly situated over a container of chopped walnuts I use for salads. Turns out that was the exact opposite of what I should have been doing. “Ready-to-eat foods such as prepared sandwiches and salads, beverages and creamers, or even leftovers that might just need to be reheated take top precedence and usually occupy the top shelf of the refrigerator so that nothing potentially hazardous can fall onto them before they are consumed,” Vu says.
According to Vu, eggs and raw meats should occupy the lower shelves. But even then, there is a hierarchy to consider. For example, “raw beef needs to be cooked to 145°F and therefore should never be placed below raw chicken, which needs to be cooked to 165°F.”
There’s a really important food safety consideration at the root of this: “If a spill were to occur and the chicken was dripping into the beef, the beef may potentially never be cooked to a high enough temperature to kill microbes that may have been present in the chicken, and this can lead to foodborne illness,” Vu says. This is an example of cross-contamination, which is a top priority to avoid.
After Vu’s advice, I kept my raw meat on the bottom shelf (currently some ground turkey I am defrosting to meal prep turkey meatballs), and moved items such as salad greens and cheeses and creamer to the top shelf. Eggs and various portioned packages of leftovers are below the cheese and creamer but above the meat.
Label everything.
Chefs need to be extremely careful and organized when they are running a busy restaurant kitchen, and they’ll generally label all foods in the refrigerator, at a minimum with what the food is and the date it was opened or produced. “A roll of blue or green painter’s tape on a dispenser and a permanent marker kept nearby can be an invaluable tool for organization. Having everything dated also makes it easier to implement a FIFO system, which stands for first in, first out,” says Vu.
This helps to reduce food waste by ensuring you are maximizing your food purchases, saving you money in the long run. While I haven’t gone to that point in my newly organized fridge yet, I did make a point of reading the sell-by date on every single item in there and was able to toss a lot more than expected. That created a lot more space.
Contain items.
The chef also gave me some great pointers as to what to do with future prepared foods and leftovers I may need to store in my fridge — and it was simpler than I could have imagined: plastic deli containers. These containers, the kind you get when you order takeout soup, come in three main sizes: quarts (four cups), pints (two cups), and cups (one cup). “These containers are a great way to consolidate opened food items or prepared foods, and can be easily labeled,” Vu says. Chefs always consolidate foods into the smallest possible container, which saves space and makes it easier to locate items and ingredients in the refrigerator.
Bonus: Get a thermometer.
Going forward, a thermometer placed at the warmest spot in the refrigerator (usually near the door) is something worthy of investment to ensure food safety as well. “Microbes that can cause foodborne illness multiply rapidly between 41°F and 140°F, known as the temperature danger zone. Checking regularly that your refrigerator is maintaining a temperature below 41°F and not placing hot foods inside your refrigerator until they have cooled to at least room temperature will minimize chances that the food or foods around it will be hovering in the temperature danger zone for long,” Vu says.
Further Reading
We Tested (and Rated!) Every Sofa at West Elm — Here Are the Best for Every Type of Need
Everything You’ve Ever Wanted To Know About Article’s DTC Furniture
