One truly annoying thing is having your baby carrots turn slimy in the fridge. The carrots may appear fine on the outside, but you will immediately notice it is very slippery and slimy when you touch one.
Can You Wash Slimy Carrots?
Raw baby carrots which are slimy and soft to the touch have already started to go bad. At this point washing them with water is not going to get rid of the slime. The safest thing to do at this point is to throw the carrots away.
Unfortunately at this point your carrots are past their fresh date and have entered the early stages of molding.
If you are relatively healthy and the carrots do not smell or taste particularly bad. You will probably survive eating slimy baby carrots. I have before, but the texture was not fun to eat raw.
How To Clean Slimy Carrots
You can not easily wash the slime off baby carrots. As it is a thick layer that usually penetrates fairly deep.
If you really need to try and save the carrots and use them regardless of any slime. Remember the slime is usually invisible and if no other noticeable rot has appeared, the carrots can still be edible.
You are going to want to peel the carrots outer layer off. Trying to get to the center where the carrot is still possibly fresh.
Rinsing the carrots off with water is a good idea before you peel them. Use hot water and a paper towel to wash and scrub the carrots dry. This should remove part of slime and nasty moisture from the carrots.
Then use a vegetable peeler to skin the carrots completely. Removing the exposed parts that have become slimy.
If your carrots are still very soft and unable to peel very easily. Then they are too far gone to save with this method. Throw those out and don’t try to cook with them at all.
Carrots that have been saved early enough should be able to be peeled down to a fresher core. Store them on a counter wrapped in a paper towel or slice and use them as soon as possible.
Carrots that have undergone this method of cleaning and possible revival. Should be cooked immediately. Also I wouldn’t use them in as raw ingredients in anything like a salad for example. Best to boil or roast them to cook away any possible lingering bacteria.
How To Keep Baby Carrots from Getting Slimy
Avoiding the slimy carrot problem is about being proactive. Then you shouldn’t have to worry about trying to save them after its too late.
Fortunately there are a number of different ways you can store baby carrots to keep them fresh much longer. Slimy carrots are typically a result of too much moisture and being exposed to this humid environment past their due date.
So there are two solutions for reducing the humidity and keeping the carrots from being too wet.
Both solutions are equally as easy to fix, so don’t worry. One could be the result of improper use of your refrigerator crisper drawer.
Refrigerator Drawers: Should Carrots Be Stored In High or Low Humidity?
If you don’t know what a crisper drawer is, then let me inform you because you probably already knew about this but didn’t know the name.
Crispers is another name for the humidity drawers in your fridge. Most refrigerators have two of them. One for vegetables and the other for storing fruits.
Each drawer has a adjustable slider (called a window) used to control how much humidity the drawer contains. The slider is either open or closed, or even partially or wide open for precise adjustment.
Humidity drawers are separated by the amount of humidity in each drawer. With two drawers you are suppose to make one high-humidity and one low.
The slider or window allows you adjust the humidity, giving you option to use either the right or left drawer for either high or low. It’s up to you which side you want to designate.
Now you want to store vegetables (carrots) in the high-humidity drawer and fruit in the low-humidity drawer, although certain fruits can stored in this drawer as well.
The low-humidity drawer works best for fruit and not many if any vegetables hold up well in these drawers.
So it may seem counter intuitive at this point, to store your carrots in the high-humidity drawer after we mentioned drying to get rid of excess moisture.
This is where you should make sure the window slider for your high-humidity drawer isn’t close all the way. Especially if you are getting slimy carrots rather quickly.
Closing the window traps in more moisture in the drawer creating more humidity. So try opening it up slightly or halfway and see if your baby carrots last longer.
Storing Carrots In Plastic Bags
Another method is to remove the carrots from the original bag they were packaged in. Since as mentioned water is typically added during packaging to keep the carrots fresher.
Then place them in a drier bag after letting them dry out in a paper towel for about 5 minutes.
You can also try removing the carrots, drying the bag out and then leaving it slightly open as you store your carrots. This will allow some extra air flow to keep the carrots from getting too muggy.
Freezing Carrots
The third method is to simply freeze your baby carrots. Which you can use the bag they came in with or try a freezer bag in case the one might tear easily.
Freezing carrots is usually just fine to do but it can obviously affect the cooking time. As the carrots will take longer to heat up when adding them to soup for example. Really the time isn’t significantly longer since carrots do thaw fairly quickly.
If you do freeze your carrots I would not thaw them out and store them longer than a few days. Instead use them right away for the food you are cooking. You could possibly begin to thaw them out in the fridge for a few hours first.
Frozen carrots will last the longest and will not become slimy at all. So this is the surest way to store them for longer periods of time.
