How long does broccoli last in the fridge?

The realistic range: a whole, unwashed head of broccoli keeps for around five to seven days in the fridge, sometimes closer to ten if it went in fresh and properly cold straight after buying. Cut into florets, that window drops to roughly three or four days, and cooked broccoli follows the same three-to-four day window as most other cooked leftovers. What actually catches people out is not the timeline so much as the yellowing — broccoli visibly changes faster than almost anything else in the crisper drawer, and that has less to do with your fridge than with what broccoli actually is.

A flower head, not a root, and that changes everything

The broccoli in a shopping bag is not built like a potato or a carrot. It is a tightly packed cluster of unopened flower buds, cut while still alive and still trying to do what a flower does — open. Root vegetables are storage organs, built by the plant to sit dormant for months; broccoli was never built to wait. After it is cut, it keeps breathing, burning through its own sugar reserves far faster than a potato or an onion does, and the yellow colour that shows up within a few days is chlorophyll breaking down as the buds edge toward actually flowering. Nothing has gone wrong when that happens. It is broccoli doing what a cut flower stem does, just slower, and in a fridge instead of a vase.

Ethylene again — keep it away from the fruit bowl

Broccoli is one of the more ethylene-sensitive vegetables you are likely to store, in the same category as lettuce. Apples, bananas, pears and ripening tomatoes all give off ethylene as they age, and broccoli left near them for even a couple of days picks up the same russet-yellow speckling that comes from natural ageing — just sooner than it would have on its own. It is also one of the few vegetables that gives something back: broccoli itself releases a small amount of ethylene as it ages, so a bag of florets left too long can very slightly speed up its own decline once a few pieces start to turn. Keeping it in a separate drawer from fruit, or at least not stacked directly against it, buys back real days.

What actually decides the window for a given head

Whole beats cut, for the same reason it does with lettuce or an avocado. An intact head, especially one with the stem still solid and any leaves still attached, has far less exposed surface for moisture to escape from or bacteria to take hold on. Cutting it into florets ahead of time multiplies that exposed surface many times over, which is the entire reason florets sit at the short end of the range even when bought the same day as a whole head.

Moisture has to be balanced, not sealed in. Broccoli wants some humidity, but a fully airtight bag traps the vegetable's own respiration — moisture, carbon dioxide and that small amount of self-produced ethylene — right against the florets, which softens them and brings on the sulfurous, distinctly "off" smell brassicas are known for well before they are actually spoiled. Storing it unwashed, loosely wrapped in a slightly damp paper towel inside a bag that is not fully sealed, gives the head somewhere for that moisture to go instead of sitting on it.

The cut-flower trick genuinely works. Trimming a little off the base of the stem and standing the head upright in a shallow inch of water in the fridge, loosely covered, lets it keep drawing up water the way it did on the plant. It is the same idea that extends fresh herbs, and it noticeably slows a head that is starting to look tired.

Yellow is not the same problem as slimy or smelly

A head that has turned partly yellow, or gone a little soft and rubbery at the stem, has lost quality, not necessarily safety — it will taste stronger and more cabbage-like and cook up softer than it would have fresh, and plenty of people simply use it anyway, especially in a soup or stir-fry where texture matters less. What is actually worth acting on is different: dark brown or black patches, a texture that has gone properly slimy rather than just soft, or a smell that has crossed from broccoli's normal mild, faintly sulfurous cooking smell into something sharper and distinctly rotten. Those are the signs worth trusting over how many days it has technically been in the fridge.

What actually helps

• Buy it whole, cut it just before cooking. A florets bag bought pre-cut is already several days into its shorter clock before it reaches your fridge at all.
• Keep it away from apples, bananas, pears and ripening tomatoes. Ethylene is behind most of the early yellowing that gets blamed on the fridge.
• Store loosely wrapped, not sealed airtight. A slightly damp paper towel inside a bag that is not fully closed manages moisture without trapping the gases that soften it.
• Stand a tired head in a little water. Trimming the stem and treating it like a cut flower is a real fix for early wilting, not folklore.
• Treat cooked broccoli like any other cooked leftover. Cooking slows the clock; it does not reset it to indefinitely fresh.

Broccoli is also one of the easier things to lose track of precisely because a head at the back of the crisper still looks green from a glance through the drawer, right up until the day it clearly is not. Munch logs each batch with the day it went in and where it is stored, shared with everyone in the household, so a head with a couple of days left shows up on the same list as everything else — instead of depending on whoever put it away still remembering it is there.