Sometimes buying a special ingredient for a recipe means buying more than you need and being left with more than you can use up before it goes bad. Thankfully, one sustainability influencer has a quick and easy solution for one of those ingredients: feta cheese.
The scoop
The Useless Project on Instagram (@theuselessproject) shared a simple, but as she called it, "next-level," food waste hack for storing feta cheese longer, after joking that it can go "pink" and "slimy" in what feels like record time.
"If you fill a jar with salty water, the feta will keep in that jar for like a week and a half. The texture still remains the same, it doesn't get soft, and it preserves perfectly," she explains, adding that it's "such a winner."
How it's working
Scientifically, storing the feta in salty water helps it retain its moisture, and the salt adds to its flavor, mimicking the brine feta often comes packaged in that can be used in other dishes as well, per Daily Meal.
Preventing food waste is crucial to helping your wallet and the environment. According to Feeding America, people in the United States throw away 92 billion pounds of food annually, equal to $473 billion in money wasted on food sent to landfills. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that food waste is the "single most common material landfilled and incinerated in the U.S."
Making food last longer and using all that you buy stretches your dollar as well, something that will matter as food prices keep increasing in part because of rising global temperatures. If you want more tips on keeping food fresher longer, check out The Cool Down's guide here.
More and more people and businesses are looking to cut down on food waste, like Too Good To Go, an app that connects customers to restaurants and stores with food surpluses that need to be bought and used.
What people are saying
People in the comments of The Useless Project's posts loved her easy hack.
"Doing a public service!" one person declared, while another noted: "It will keep for months. We make it on the farm and feta style cheese will keep for a month or two even once it's in a strong enough brine," they added, though it may be safer to follow the Instagram video's advice and stay closer to a week and a half by default rather than pushing the limits and risking getting sick.
Another person said they were the only feta fan in their house, "so I'm forever throwing it out and feeling guilty — this is brilliant."
"This is a game changer — I live alone and one of my favourite meals includes half a block," added a fourth person. "EVERY TIME a half a block then rots in the fridge."
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