How do you deal with moldy foods?

Foods grow mold colonies. It's one of the primary ways that our foods spoil. When that happens, what do you do about it?

I grew up being taught that when a block of cheese grows mold, you cut it off -- careful to get it all and you eat the rest. But if an orange in the fruit bowl has a patch of green mold, you toss it. If there's a small amount of mold on top of a batch of yogurt, I spoon it into the compost and as long as there's no off flavor, I eat the rest.

When I read Sandor Katz' Wild Fermentation, over twenty years ago, he talked about the tradition of lifting the mat of mold from the top of the kraut barrel and serving the good stuff underneath. But in the online fermentation groups I've been part of, it's pretty common for people to declaim that if there's a speck of mold, it has riddled the kraut (or whatever) with invisible mold roots that will kill you. I don't really know the microbiological truth, but guessing it's somewhere in the middle seems safe.

Among permies, it seems like there would be two impulses in tension: Thrift drives us not to waste. And food purity drives us to seek wellness.

So, where do you land?

It kind of depends on you. Roughly 20% of people are basically immune to mold and mycotoxins, 20% are extremely sensitive, and the rest are somewhere in between. I am in the extremely sensitive group, so I have to throw out anything with a trace of mold.

I usually cut off the mold on fermented dairy because it's localized.

With veggies it usually depends. Sometimes I get rot/mold on onions that appears to be only exterior but I cut it open and it goes into the core. In that case I just toss the whole thing.

Oh, onions are a good weird case! I often will find mold between two layers of the onion and I'm comfortable peeling those two out and tossing them but eating the rest.

Christopher Weeks wrote:I'm comfortable peeling those two out and tossing them but eating the rest.

I do that sometimes but usually when I am dealing with onions, I am slicing them up on the fly as I'm cooking, because I don't prep beforehand. So it's mostly just laziness and being unprepared.

I had the privilege (?) of living with a microbiologist in college, who gleefully informed us every time we cut off the moldy parts of a block of cheese and ate the rest that MOLD PENETRATES and we were still eating mold that we couldn't see.

I was poor as heck and was going to eat anything that didn't eat me first.

I think there is mold and there is mold. Kraut I think is a different story (there is a clear division between the mat on top and the kraut below); mold on cheese bothers me a lot less. And I am a lot more concerned about botulism or salmonella in food that has been sitting out or crappy kitchen/bathroom hygiene giving me rotavirus/norovirus/hepatitis/etc.

I personally still cut the mold off of things and eat any salvageable parts (fruit, bread, cheese; I try to give a good margin for the 'roots'. if a sauce or something in the fridge has mold I will sometimes scrape it out or sometimes throw the whole thing away, occasionally mold is evidence that the whole thing is bad). I depend heavily on how things look and smell.
I've gotten much better at storing cheese (wrapped in wax or butcher paper and then put in a bag in fridge). And that moldy orange (although sometimes half can be saved....) gets saved to make ant repellant (that mold can be brought back to the nest, where it outcompetes the fungus the ants grow on the vegetation they cut).

Like Christopher, if it is cheese I cut if off.

And like Tyler said with onions.

Preserves I pick out the mold.

Everything else goes into my rear fridge to freeze dry then into the trash when it no longer smell bad.

Christopher Weeks wrote:Thrift drives us not to waste.

Animals/compost/bokashi make me feel about 90% better about throwing away food. It gets a second chance at life!

I admit to being one of those people who gets rid of it, if there is even a little mold. As my journey progresses, however, I have moved away from simply throwing it away... to feeding it to the chickens or the compost pile instead.

Depends upon how much mold.  Usually I just remove the mold. In severe cases it goes to the compost.  In the rare case of making kraut, I remove the mold.

I have always had a very sensitive sniffer, and as a child I caused no small amount of distress to my parents by refusing to eat foods that were deemed ‘off’.  I can still hear my dad’s anxious groan as he watched me perform the act of olfactory judgement that would doom another hard won meal.

Fast forward to today, about eight years into a pretty intense fermentation journey. These days I cackle with delight at recipes like those found in Pascal Baudar’s book Wildcrafted Fermentation. Fermented forest floor? Oh heck yes, let me at it!

The child whose brow crinkled in consternation at the slightest whiff of moldy or funky notes, is blown away by the things I will happily put in my mouth today. For every new flavor that has a galaxy of wonder exploding on my tongue, there are others that have me wondering, ‘Am I going to regret this later???’

Mold and I have become very close. I am extremely sensitive to moldy notes and can taste it even when it is not visible or others can’t. In my experimenting I’ve ingested plenty. Staggeringly, I am still here. I have regretted very few of my tastings, and those were all mild gastro distress, nothing earth shattering.

Here’s my personal stance on moldy food, no science or data to back it up, just my own experience:

I don’t mess around with colored molds. Pink, blue, black - nope.  I toss those items.

White or grey molds though, I am happy to remove the layer and eat what’s underneath. If the flavor is unaffected I don’t give it another thought.