When It Comes To Storage, Onions And Potatoes Should Break Up

Potatoes and onions are a produce power couple. These versatile veggies are staple foods for billions of people around the globe, and even the most casual home cooks usually have a potato and an onion lying around. This is for a number of reasons: They're affordable, tasty, and can last several weeks — even months — when stored in a cool, dark, and dry place. This makes it all too tempting to toss your potatoes and onions into the same drawer. But when it comes to storage, these tubers and alliums don't have such great chemistry.

Although potatoes and onions thrive under similar conditions, when stored close together they share a mutually harmful — some might even say toxic — relationship. Potatoes have a relatively high water content and naturally release moisture as they ripen. Nearby onions will absorb this moisture and rapidly become mushy and moldy. Onions, in turn, release ethylene gas, which speeds up the ripening process of the potatoes, resulting in spuds that rapidly sprout.

If you shouldn't store potatoes and onions together, how should you store them? There's plenty of healthy discourse on how to properly stash potatoes for later, and even farmers have offered tips on how to store onions. In order to avoid this article turning into a novel, we won't dive too deep into these tips, but some of the most important points are to keep onions in a well-ventilated spot and to store those spuds away from the sun. (This will stop your potatoes from turning green.)

The simplest way to prevent your potatoes and onions from developing a toxic relationship is to keep them isolated by placing them in separate cabinets or pantries (like social distancing, but for produce). If space is tight, try to store potatoes and onions at least a few feet away from one another and keep a physical barrier between them. You can purchase adorable potato and onion storage tins – like this set of three, metal Suwimut storage tins — to make stashing your spuds and alliums an easy task. And don't worry, these two wonderful ingredients will have plenty of time to get reacquainted when you use both of them to make a beautiful, cheesy tartiflette.