I know, cool dry place, and it depends on your climate, etc. But what is your experience?
I don’t think I’ve ever had a potato become moldy. On the rare occasion that they go bad, they just get kind of shrivelly.
Months. Most of the time the potatoes go Eldritch horror and start looking for soil before they get in any way bad. I’ve had a few shrivel, but I’ve never had a moldy potato I had to throw away.
I also don’t eat potatoes very often. The ones In buy tend to serve a long sentence.
As a child my family would store potatoes in our cellar all winter into the next year where we would plant them again. Staying between 45-50°F, with high humidity, good ventilation, and no light will make them last 6 months or more.
wait. you want high humidity?
We put our save potatoes in a burlap sack and buried them below the frost line. They came out in the spring almost exactly like they went in in the fall.
How did they store them? The only cellar I’ve ever been in was of the house we lived in when I was a little kid, and I remember it as so wet and filled with spiders, and maybe the average cellar isn’t quite like that.
Practically impossible to say. You never know how old potatoes you get from the store might be. Maybe a few days, maybe a few weeks. I’ve had freshly harvested and cleaned potatoes go months before showing new root growth on the outside, but I’ve had a new bag of potatoes have one or two turn moldy in a few days.
Depends on conditions.
Traditionally potatoes were harvested in fall (just before the first freeze) and stored in a root cellar with stable, cool temps (above about 45) and moderate humidity (IIRC, between 40-60%), and well stacked (good airflow between them, like with straw or even in bushel baskets. I’ve read storing them in sand is a great way to stabilize moisture loss.
Stored like this they last all winter. They tend to dry out some, get soft and wrinkly, but completely fine to eat.
My root cellar is low humidity and a little warmer, so at 3 months they’re a little dry and wrinkly. I’ve never, ever had mold on potatoes. Mold is a result of high humidity and no air flow.
They do require attention while stored - like other fruits and veg, if one goes bad it’ll affect the others.
Interesting. I’d read how vegetables “used to” go in root cellars for winter, but I would just imagine a hole dug in the cellar of the house where I lived as a kid, and vegetables dumped in. I had no idea of stacking or anything.
I live in a desert so extremely low humidity and the pantry area is often over 80. I’ve used potatoes over a month after buying them many times. I still use them for myself if they have small sprouts. I usually don’t see mold until closer to two months in. If I’m cooking for others I’ll buy fresh. Our local grocer has a very small selection of produce so I tend to buy a bunch of the nicer ones if I see they’ve restocked since the next grocery store is about an hour away. When I lived in the city though I’d only buy what I planned on using within the next couple days. More trips but always fresh.