Fresh Fruit Preservation

[Jenise]

Two days ago I bought a clamshell pack of cherries at Costco. First day, they were hard and crispy, but a few were oddly soft. Yesterday, another 25% were oddly soft too. Today another 25-50% are the same. And it's not the kind of softness one would get from cherries sitting in your fridge for a week, the soft-to-the-touch, give-under-pressure softness. Rather, the softness is large areas of very wet and mushy spots. I sorted through all the cherries and pulled out the good ones early this morning; but just now I went to help myself to a bowl and a quite a few of those that were perfect five hours ago have now developed wet spots. I mean wet like your finger goes right through it.

It's like the cherries are dissolving.

What is this the result of? It's like nothing I've ever seen happen to fruit, and I suspect it has to do with the method of preservation. I'm so weirded out by it that I just threw all the remaining cherries, even the ones ostensibly still okay, in the trash.

Anybody else encounter this kind of thing before?

Possible cold damage during either transport or while in storage?

I'm guessing they were partially frozen sometime along their journey.

I had something like this happens with some onions I just bought. Spots turned soft and brown, here and there. I figured they got caught in a freeze somewhere.

[Jenise]

3-0 for freezing; that hadn't occurred to me (obviously) but you guys are probably right. Typical Costco problem isn't it? Fruit often looks so good, but isn't. Might be a typical winter problem up here when we're having extended freezing temps--I remember that from Alaska, but had forgotten about it.

4-0 for freezing!


Mike