Spring Clean Your Fridge

For dairy lovers, the refrigerator is the true center of the kitchen: It keeps milk cold and refreshing, cheese and sour cream perfectly chilled, and of course, it keeps ice cream from turning to soup. (Well, the freezer does that last part—but we think it counts!) This spring, give your fridge the TLC it deserves with a proper refresh. Once you’ve thrown out that month-old stew from the very back of the shelf and given everything a good wipedown, here are four more things you can do to keep your hardest-working kitchen appliance clean and well cared for. 

Keep Things Cool

A refrigerator has one job: to keep your food at a safe, cool (but not freezing) temperature. Generally, you want your refrigerator to run somewhere between 35 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit. This is especially important for things like meat and dairy, which spoil quickly when stored anywhere above 40 degrees. The California Milk Advisory Board specifies that cow’s milk should be stored between 38 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the container it was sold in. Other dairy products—cheese, yogurt, sour cream, half-and-half—should also be stored under these conditions. 

But have you ever wondered whether your fridge is actually maintaining a safe temperature? Get a fridge thermometer. They’re cheap (under $10) and come printed with safe temperature ranges right on the dial so it’s easy to check at a glance.

It also matters where in your fridge you keep your food. Heat rises, so generally speaking, the bottom shelves in your fridge are the coldest and the top shelves are warmest. It’s best to keep already-cooked food like leftovers (or that grocery store rotisserie chicken) on the top shelf, milk and other dairy products on the middle shelves, and spoil-prone items like raw meat, fish, and eggs on the bottom shelves.

What about the door? Great question. The door is the least consistent part of a fridge, temperature-wise: It’s not as insulated as the interior, and every time you open your fridge, the door gets blasted with warm air. For this reason, dairy products, eggs, and meat should never be stored in the door. (Butter is okay, though—it doesn’t need to stay as cold as other types of dairy.)

Let Your Fridge Breathe

In addition to temperature, another important factor to consider with food storage is airflow. A refrigerator is constantly circulating air, and any disruption can cause warm spots that encourage spoiling (or cold spots that encourage freezing). Cleaning unused food off the shelves and doors will keep things moving. To keep things extra-fresh, you can also put an open box of baking soda in your fridge and/or freezer to absorb any unwanted odors; for best results, change it out every 3 months or so.

Your crisper drawers are also an important part of proper fridge airflow. They’re designed to give you control over the humidity levels in the drawers themselves. (Those little sliders adjust how much air gets in and out.) If you have two crisper drawers, it’s best to designate one for high humidity and one for low humidity. Thin-skinned produce that loses moisture quickly (e.g., salad greens, asparagus, zucchini, delicate herbs) goes in the high humidity drawer, while most fruits can go in the low-humidity drawer. If you only have one drawer, choose one option and stick to it.

Know Your Dates

Despite what you may think—or what you may have been told—the dates that you see printed on perishable food products are not expiration dates, or the last date the product is safe to eat. (The only exception is infant formula, which should not be used after its use-by date. For more detailed information, please read the FDA’s guide to food product dating.) Here are what the four most common dates actually mean, straight from the FDA’s food product dating regulations:

• A "Best if Used By/Before" date indicates when a product will be of best flavor or quality
• A "Sell-By" date tells the store how long to display the product for sale for inventory management
• A “Use-By" date is the last date recommended for the use of the product while at peak quality (except infant formula)
• A “Freeze-By” date indicates when a product should be frozen to maintain peak quality

In other words, none of these dates represent a hard-and-fast deadline for safely consuming perishable food. Your best bet for telling if something has actually expired is still a good old-fashioned sniff test: If food smells unpleasant or “off” in any way, it’s time to get rid of it. But if it smells fine, it’s safe to eat. In fact, it may remain so for several days after the date on the packaging.

Label Your Leftovers

The final step in any fridge refresh is making sure it stays that way. While this is somewhat of an uphill battle, there are ways to make it easier—and luckily, the most powerful weapons against fridge chaos are also the cheapest and easiest to use. All you need is a roll of masking tape and a Sharpie. 

Before you put your leftovers away, write the contents of the container and the date you prepared them on a piece of tape, then put the tape on the container. Store your leftovers with the label facing out towards the door so you can see it the second you open the fridge. You’ll still have to do the occasional sniff test to double-check that something is safe to eat, but labeling your leftovers is a simple way to make sure you never have to answer “Wait, when did I make this?” again—and that’s worth its weight in gold.