I do the opposite. I buy a bag of green ones, and put them in the fridge. They stay green for a while in there but do start to slowly ripen. Before I put them in the fridge on day 0, I put one on the counter, and one in a brown bag. The brown bag is for day 2, the one on the counter is for day 3 (there is no day 1 after day 0, at first). On day 2, when I take the ripe one out of the bag, I take another out of the fridge and put it on the counter for day 4, and continue this process. When I take the last one out of the fridge, I have another bag ready to go in. With the right timing, this provides a perfectly ripe avocado per day.
And for storing a cut avocado, the press & seal plastic wrap works wonders. The trick is to not let air touch the exposed bit. If it does, then just slicing a thin slice off the top exposes the green part again. (This also works for frozen loaves of bread that have been cut - just a thin slice off the end gets rid of the bit that was destroyed by ice.)
My memoirs will include all my food storage tips for the perpetually single.
I find storing the avocados in the fridge causes them to brown without really ripening. I usually buy a bag of 5 and try to eat them over a 3 or 4 day period starting when the first one ripens. Fresh Direct also sells packs of 2 ripe avocados. So you can buy 2 ripe avocados and a bag of hard avocados, eat the ripe ones, and then the hard ones should be ripe enough to eat.
My avocado tree usually drops a dozen or two avocados a week for most of the year, so I've had a lot of time and examples to experiment on for storage.
Once they're off the tree, ripen at room temperature for about a week. Then transfer into the fridge in an airtight container, they usually last in the fridge for another 2 weeks.
Doing fridge first means they never ripen and just dry out before softening.
My aunt has an avocado tree. Freshly-picked avocados ripen very differently than store-bought ones. They stay ripe for way longer, since they don't have to be picked in advance and shipped. And I say this as someone who lives in CA, where we get produce on the fresher side, in general.
When I visited my aunt she gave us several avocados, and I thought, "we're never going to be able to eat these before they go bad". I was so wrong — they stayed perfect for well over a week.
I am not an expert for avocados, but I suspect that they do the same as with most fruits (I worked in fruitpicking while backpacking):
apart from herbicides, fungicide and pesticides, there are chemicals to block the ripening while the fruit is still on the tree, because you want to harvest all fruits at once. And then you do various things for packaging.
And there were likely other purposes as well, I have forgotten now. All in all, lots of them were used, way more than I expected. So much, that I prefer organic.
I think it's the cooler coastal climate I'm in that slows down the growth so the regular 3 month harvest period is spread across 9.
It still only flowers once a year in spring like a normal tree, but by that following winter (regular harvest time), only the clusters with few siblings would have grown large enough for harvest. Then it flowers again, and then bigger family clusters reach maturity in the summer/fall.
My avocado tree when I lived in a much hotter climate would drop all the fruit as soon as it started getting hot (they would dry out and wither on the tree).
We trade figs for lamb, we make glace figs for the year, we make fig jam, the staff from the local patisserie raid the tree a few times and we get half price curry pies for the rest of the year ..
My father planted the tree (he was born in 1935) and does most of the bulk cooking | prep here still; he's a great grand parent, I'm a grand parent ... we're doing pretty good on extended family, thank you for the implied offer of surplus humans but they tend to be for life and not just for christmas.
An avocado also has an order of magnitude more nutritional value. Tomatoes are 95% water with little to show for the other 5%. Avocados have significantly more carbs, fat, and nutrients.
Meat is extremely nutritious. And isn't 7000 L of water but of virtual water. This concept is meaningless as it is for decision making. It's way more complex than that.
I've seen the technique of using the knife to rotate the pit, but I don't really do it because I'm generally happy with radial pieces so cutting the pit half into quarters isn't a problem. I also just generally have one avocado at a time, so I'm not going for speed (as one would say making guac).
But my point was that unless you actually slice the pit in half, neither half is going to have a flat face that you can put on a plate of oil or whatever. Rather one half is going to have the pit sticking out, and the other half is going to have a pit shaped indentation that doesn't touch the oil.
Trying to change the rate at which avocados ripen is way beyond anything I would ever worry about. Because I can't even tell when they're ripe! The article is spot-on when it says (emphasis mine):
> "The window of time in which they are absolutely perfect—soft and tender with no brown spots or streaks—is notoriously short."
But then it claims:
> "...gauge ripeness by touch: Using your fingers, very gently press on the avocado near the stem end (that's where the avocado was once attached to the tree). You want to feel a slight tenderness and give. If the avocado is very firm, it's not ready; if it feels soft and mushy, it's gone too far."
I have gotten this wrong so many times that it seems like useless advice. The skin of the avocado is so stiff and wrinkly by the stem end, you simply cannot tell. By the time you apply enough force to feel through the skin, you're going to explode the avocado.
But if you try pressing against the side, where you can sometimes feel the level of hardness/softness more accurately (if it is a particularly thin-skinned one), you bruise it.
I'm an expert in the kitchen at basically everything else, but trying to figure out if an avocado is ripe or not just absolutely defeats me. I've routinely cut into an avocado I thought was underripe, only to discover it's so over-ripe it's inedible, because the skin all over is so darn tough that the whole thing simply felt rock-hard all over. It's like fossilized reptile skin.
How does anyone do it? I'm talking about regular Hass avocados bought in the northeast US shipped from Mexico.
At the end of the day, I just buy a few, wait 3 days, cut into one, and if it's ripe I try to eat the rest quickly. If not, I throw it out, wait another couple days, and repeat. Ugh.
If you want to go for a over-the-top techy solution you could do non-destructive testing with a near-infrared handheld spectrometer. It's a pretty neat technique that can determine ripeness of a lot of fruits (and properties of other materials) if that can be detected via abundance of certain molecules.
It looks though that Consumer Physics stopped selling their SCiO device that was ~$250 to consumers, and I don't know if there is any equivalent current alternative.
Lots of consumer cameras have near infrared sensitivity, mostly 750nm but with a long exposure I can get photographs through a 900nm filter in my Fuji X-Pro. You lose at least four stops.
Could the photography technique work to determine ripeness? Assuming the fruit is fairly motionless of course.
I have to admit I'm not the biggest expert on it. I mainly know about it because my brother wrote his PhD thesis about using portable Vis/NIR spectrometers as food checkers (verifying that they perform on par with expensive desktop spectrometers).
He showed me the SCiO in person a few times, and IIRC always had to make direct contact with the solid probe, so I'd be surprised if a NIR photograph would be a suitable substitute. I think it also mainly measures the area of the fruit where you make contact, so to get an optimal picture about the ripeness of a single fruit it's good to take multiple measurements. That also usually makes fruits with tick skins/shells (e.g. melons) hard to measure.
There seems to be a startup[0] aiming to bring suitable sensors to smartphones so that anyone has access to it - something that the food checker research literature has been hinting at for some time.
Thinking about it a little more, it might have some mileage. The IR spectrometer is just measuring the color of the avocado, albeit very precisely and under known lighting conditions.
One of the reasons photographers enjoy infrared photography¹ is because foliage shows up brilliant white against pitch black² skies³. Photosynthesis is inhibited by both green and IR light so plants are bright in IR for the same reason our eyes see it as green.
I absolutely think that you could get the same result with a flash photograph from a good modern camera and probably just using the green channel. One of the many things these cameras are designed to be good at is detecting minute subtleties in shades of green⁴.
I’m looking forward to trying it on the weekend.
―
1. Traditionally done with a monochromatic black and white film where only deep, bright reds gave the negative any density, rendering as brightness in a positive print. This is in contrast to “panchro” black and white where a bright object of any color would print as white.
2. Unlike blue light, the atmosphere disperses almost no infrared.
4. Our eye’s sensitive to green is partly why digital cameras have twice as many green sensors as they do red and blue. It’s also why high fidelity inkjet printers use more shades of ink for printing photographs. (Epson printers use one yellow, two different cyans, and three different magentas.)
I already can't imagine going back to life before my infrared thermometer -- for food, for liquid temp, for pan temperature, for pan hotspots...
And similarly you can pry my sous vide circulator away from my cold dead hands.
If there was seriously something guaranteed to tell you ripeness, that would be golden. (Pineapples, mangoes, and melons like canteloupes, are sometimes tricky too -- I'm usually pretty good at figuring them out, but sometimes they surprise you.)
I press against the side and it mushes in slightly. this tells you the avocado is ripe or past ripe. When you cut it open, then if it's already browning, it's gone past ripe.
I agree it's a bit difficult but I used to make a few pounds of guacamole a day and it always worked great.
Squeeze the side of the avocado, and if it gives AT ALL it's ready to eat.
If it's soft it's way way overripened. Take a piece of cardboard between you fingers and squeeze - that's the firmness level that indicates the avocado is ready. Actually even more firm than the cardboard and the avocado is still ready.
> where you can sometimes feel the level of hardness/softness more accurately (if it is a particularly thin-skinned one), you bruise it
You just need to press it gently with all your fingers around the principal axis, not on the poles (as if your hand were a spider). If it feels hard, is not ready; if it feels soft, but not too soft, is ready. Also the color and the texture of the skin. Green means green, black and clear/bright + soft means ripe, black and opaque/wrinkled + too soft means overripe.
You must be consistently getting the world's worst avocados - do you always buy them from the same store? Though it might just be a variety designed for distant shipping that sucks in general.
None of what you described sounds accurate to me but I'm spoiled in the Southwest. Ripe avocados are definitely soft and when I find the rare one that isn't, it's usually a bad avocado altogether (most of the flesh is very tough despite being overripe).
See how the outside is super bumpy, and there's a thick rigid brown layer before you get to the green flesh? Rock-hard skin even if the flesh is soft. A serrated knife helps to cut through it without smushing the flesh.
Where the skin is visibly much thinner and smoother and there's no brown layer, and I can only imagine that's the type of avocado where people can judge its ripeness. But those don't seem to be available in NYC at my local store or Whole Foods or anywhere...
> Where the skin is visibly much thinner and smoother and there's no brown layer, and I can only imagine that's the type of avocado where people can judge its ripeness. But those don't seem to be available in NYC at my local store or Whole Foods or anywhere...
I get both of those here in SoCal, or at least a varieties that look similar to those photos - the bumpier variety is noticeable when I come across it (it's definitely tougher). I never paid attention to the thickness of the skin or kept track of how quality correlates to the bumpiness, though. I'll keep an eye out from now on.
I wonder if there's a single vendor/broker supplying the stores in your area. Have you tried buying them from outside the boroughs?
There's an avocado delivery service in NYC that claims to deliver perfect avocados every time. There's some good press coverage around it: https://davocadoguy.net/
If its still hard there set it on the counter a day or two and check again. The test works for me with these sorts of avocados so I’m thinking user error.
Right but what I'm saying is it's always hard. Because the skin is so thick and hard there's literally no way to tell what the flesh is like underneath.
Except sometimes it's a little thinner/softer that you can actually press the outside, but you still have to use so much pressure it bruises the avocado. There's zero way of "gently" checking.
I've opened avocados that are still rock-hard on the outside, after waiting a full week, only to discover they're overripe and brown/gray on the inside.
And I have no problem with any other fruit or vegetable. Just avocados because of their crazy thick/hard rind where I live.
I just don't see how it can be "user error". My only suspicion is it's a different subvariety or grown for extra-thick skin for longer-distance transport or something.
I buy the same Hass avocados you posted, and I've lived in every region in the U.S. For the past 10 years, I have eaten an avocado (minimum 1/2 avocado) every single day. That is several thousand avocados.
I can say with absolute conviction that it isn't the rind giving you trouble. I can pick every ripe Hass avocado out of a bin of 50, and never once be wrong. That said, there are a couple of stores in my current area that have garbage Hass avocados. The ones I buy from this store are consistently gross and fibrous, even when ripe, and have a very short window. I boycott these stores. They either have a second rate supplier, or else somehow ruin the product in transport.
By the way, you need a gentle touch and the ability very slowly, smoothly increase pressure. You pick up the avocados that are not yet ripe, the moment one is on the threshold, such that there is a nearly imperceptible give which does not bounce back, you buy the avocado. It should not bruise the fruit, and you won't be able to detect it when peeled. After this check, you can visually tell when it has fully ripened, ~1-2 days later. For what it's worth, I've never successfully ripened one AFTER cutting into it, and I've never kept an uncut avocado for more than 4 days.
I think this is the most helpful comment -- first of all, I'm now just convinced that the stores I usually go to must be getting garbage avocados for whatever reason, I genuinely never guessed that would be a per-store thing. I'll try some different places, there must be different suppliers.
And I think:
> nearly imperceptible give which does not bounce back
Could be the key. I've always been looking for some pretty obvious give -- saying it's borderline impercetible seems like it might be the key. Other commenters here seem to be saying something similar.
Also good to hear the majority of people advising to feel the side or bottom (not the stem end as the article suggests).
I think there's hope for me yet! So thanks to you and everyone else who's been helping.
A durometer, acoustic impulse-response and special UV-VIS spectrophotometer are all instruments used to detect avocado ripeness and usually work well.
A durometer is the cheapest at about $40. If you're right that it's impossible to tell by hardness then it wouldn't work. But you might find that it's more sensitive than your fingers and so it can work?
I would be interested to know the result of a durometer test on your fruits because about 85% of consumers report firmness as a useful measure - a lot but certainly not everyone. So yes maybe there is some granularity to discover there: specific situations where firmness just doesn't work well?
There's a stem of sorts at one end. Prod at it from the side - if it falls off easily, it's ripe or too far gone. If it stays attached, not ripe yet.
More usefully, you can buy pre-mashed avocado in the same style as pre-made guacamole. If the use case involves (or could be made to involve) mashed avocado this option has a serious shelf life (presumably it's irradiated or similar) and lives in the fridge until use time.
I'm following Rick Bayless' directions to check the _bottom_ of the avocado and use it or put it in the refrigerator (for 3-7 days) when it gives slightly.
I've mostly had good luck, but sometimes they're just bad to start with, bad because they're bruised from mishandling, or have been exposed to too much heat.
I don't see a lot of the tough leathery ones, but I have seen a few. (Seattle, so I'm not in the southwest.) I wonder if they are a different varietal or just dried out.
Not really sure why it's giving you so much grief. I gently press on the bottom larger side and if I feel it's soft and not hard or bouncy it's good. I press on the larger sider because in my experience it takes longer to ripen.
The period of time they taste appropriate is longer than the period of optimal softness. I eat 4/day (lowest carb source of potassium), and it was initially surprising how soon they tasted good.
Also, the longer and thinner the point at the tip of the avocado, the less random the brown spots are. I rely HEAVILY on this to avoid loss, since I buy them 24 at a time when I go to Costco.
I usually put the tip of my thumb and pinky together and then press the palm flesh beneath my thumb first to get a sort of muscle memory as to what I am looking for.
Then I press the avocado around the centre and compare. If it is around the same I open and eat. Seems to work most of the time — with the super thick skinned ones I generally press higher up on the avocado (closer to the stem)
For our wedding reception (that we self-catered with a taco bar), we ordered a whole box of 100 avocados through our local school. Of course, we received them about 4 days ahead of time with the rest of the food, most of which would go bad if it sat around any longer. The avocados presented a problem: they wouldn't be ripe in time. After some asking around, we got the tip mentioned in this article, and we interspersed a dozen bananas in the box so we could JIT-compile some guacamole :) It was $4 to save the day!
If you've already mashed the avocado, you can keep it from browning by adding a little bit of ascorbic acid (vitamin C). Here[0] is a series of tests someone else did to prove that this works. I've personally had guacamole last several days in the fridge with no noticeable browning, but then again, guacamole doesn't last long in my house once it's been made. :)
Lime juice is a staple in my recipe. Have substituted with lemon juice when I'm surprised to not have lime available. It helps with the browning but not as much with the flavor
The link in my comment suggests that citrus juices actually _speed up_ browning, and I've seen other sources that corroborate this. Do it for flavor, certainly, but I wouldn't do it for preservation reasons!
I was really hoping that this would be a more detailed breakdown of the different methods, like the egg article [1]. This just presented conclusions rather than trying a bunch of avocados and evaluating (objectively or subjectively) their state of ripeness based on the environment.
Having toiled in sushi taverns for nigh on a decade, wherein the verdant avocado reigns supreme in North American fare, I have honed my skill in discerning the ripeness of countless avocados each passing annum. Nay, there lies no enchantment in this art, only diligent practice. A keen intuition doth develop with time. Lo and behold, should an avocado err in ripening, fear not. Craft thyself a guacamole or an avocado toast, and the subsequent fruit shall be of greater delight.
(I wrote a reply and asked chatGPT to rewrite it in a medieval style)
All true, although the article contains no revelations.
But one important point that is somehow overlooked is that for taste, brown spot don't matter, at all.
Depending on your guests, the preparation you're making, and your love of perfection, brown spots can maybe alter the looks of your dish. But they taste the same.
It would be a great error to prefer an unripe avocado over an over-ripe one for aesthetic reasons only. Unripe avocados are inedible. Over-ripe ones (within reason) taste perfect.
Grew up with a grove of trees, I always felt the opposite. Over-ripe can have a definite funk. With unripe, it's mostly the texture that is wrong. It's not ideal, but you can make a perfectly serviceable guac with nearly ripe avos.
> As for mashed avocado like guacamole, we think the best solution, aside from preparing it right before serving, is to press a double layer of plastic wrap directly against the surface of the avocado mixture.
Why a double layer? Does oxygen penetrate the single layer?
I'm surprised they didn't mention storing the avocado with a piece of onion. I just stored one for almost a week with no visible browning thanks to the onion. Just store the 2 cut pieces in a container and store in the fridge.
In fact I just tested this and I can give a simpler query to Google and get the correct result than ChatGPT.
If I search “onion avocado store” on Google it immediately pulls up articles explaining the chemical benefit of the storing method.
The same query on ChatGPT causes it to query me for more information about what I’m asking. Obviously it’s designed for conversational queries more so than Google which is another reason why simple queries like this are not superior on ChatGPT.
Good to know. Now, could someone please write up a similar guide for mangoes? Too many are hard when I buy them, and they start getting mushy after a week, eventually rotting. However, at no point do they become truly ripe and sweet.
Theres a tiny limit on the amount of off-the-tree ripening that will occur, and they are really difficult to "read" on the tree to know when they are ripe. Each variety is different. The key for good mango is to let them go further than you would think on the tree and hopefully the birds dont beat you to them.
Source: moved into a house with several mango trees and am now pretty good at harvesting.
Curious in Brazil generally the best produce is exported and the rest goes to the local markets due to price dynamics.
But the best mango is locally produced. Cultivars that are unsuitable for commercial distribution (you can't harvest it unripened) but super delicious. It's not an overstatement to say that many houses in my region have at least one mango tree.
This is probably sacrilege but after 40 years of being annoyed with avocado ripeness I just routinely buy them and keep them in the fridge. They don't go off and keep for weeks.
Same, my family probably goes through 10 to 15 avocados per week, so we buy them every few days at Costco to have a rotating stock. They take about 5 days to ripen, and then once it feels a little soft, we put it in the fridge, and then they last for a while in the fridge (at least a week).
The one rule at Costco, however, is to not buy avocados from Peru. For whatever reason, the loss ratio is way too high for those specifically.
I feel my life has improved immensely by the revelation of storing avocados in the fridge.
1. Ripeness-window is days, maybe even a week, and they can be super squishy and still not turn brown.
2. Because of #1, buy a good number of avocados when you notice you’re out and immediately toss them in the fridge. Maybe work to find that one in the store that is ready to go for today/tomorrow. Sure for the next few days you might not have an avocado ready, but…you probably don’t have to eat avocado every day so you’ll be ok.
3. If you really need avocados and you’re annoyed at the unripe avocados in your fridge, take one out and put it on the counter for tomorrow.
So much less stress to immediately use that purchased avocado. Net-net so much less wasted avocado.
As it's Serious Eats, I'm disappointed that they didn't test things like submerging the cut or mashed avocado in CO2 (e.g., from SodaStream, etc.) or nitrogen.
Some higher end refrigerators have various fans/vents/filters to remove ethylene quickly so as to dramatically slow down the decay of fruits and vegetables. In addition they’ll have separate compressors/motors for the fridge and freezer ti keep different humidity levels.
My Sub-Zero made this claim and I was astonished how well it delivers on it. They also give you a guide on which fruits/vegetables to store together.
Possible hack: when I was last shopping for refrigerators, I couldn't help but notice that Bosch's magic food saver technology appears to be a replaceable plastic ethylene filter that can be purchased from their website or other major retailers. Have been meaning to buy a couple and stick in my much-cheaper-than-a-Bosch refrigerator...
Avocado molesters tend to stay away from the bright green ones. At least they aren't completely dense. Buy these, fridge all but one, and then stagger removal to room temp each day to (eventually) have a perfectly ripe avocado each day rather than a pile of them all at once. Costco bagged avocados have less of a problem with molesters than the grocery store.
3-4 days from bright green will yield a perfectly rip avocado - although on occasion I've had them take 5 days.
The rotten soft spots are from the finger and thumb squeeze given by avocado molesters. And then they will tell you "well how else do you know if they're ripe?" well fuck off, you're ruining perfectly good fruit with your goddamn squeezing and impatience! What did the avocado do to you??
Impatient people deserve packaged guac. Stay away from the avocados!
> It's not a perfect solution—the avocado will still brown eventually—but you can mix in a minimal amount of browning such that diners won't know, buying yourself at least a few hours before it becomes a problem.
Or you could scrape off the thin layer of oxidized guac, and serve your diners only the fresh parts?
One thing they don't mention is that when you're storing guac in a container, you want to shape it to minimize surface area. This means not using a shallow container, but instead a narrow/tall one. That way you oxidize a smaller fraction of it, which means less waste (or less brown stuff you're mixing in with the fresh parts, if you follow their instructions).
Must the paper be brown for some reason? Or why would everybody say "BROWN paper bags"? And to the particular solution, has it to be paper, not plastic?
It has to be paper to let humidity pass out. Fruit will rot if kept in a plastic bag for too long because of the humidity build-up.
It doesn't have to be brown, it's just that the classic paper bag you buy at the store is always brown. You know, the lunch bags for kids (or adults). I've never seen them sold to consumers in any other color.
You could reuse a white bleached paper bag that you sometimes get with food delivery, but they always seem to acquire a grease stain or other liquid along the way... But the food delivery bags are often waxed, and that won't let humidity pass either.
Just oxygen-permeable. I also keep my cheese in an air-permeable bag in the fridge - if there's no bag, it dries too fast, if the bag is not air-permable the cheese gets sweaty and gross.
Maybe the paper bag breathes more? I've speed-ripened avocados in those plastic produce bags they have in the produce section with twist ties and it seems to work okay
They mean the bags made of uncoated kraft paper, which lets air in very well. "Brown [paper] bag" is essentially the name of this type of bag, which is often used for school lunches (small bags) or groceries (bigger). Here's an example:
They come in other colors--we had bleached white ones when I was a kid--and those would be fine too. However, it risks confusion with other
paper bags, like the ones used in bakeries. These often have some kind of liner (polyethylene, plastic, foil) or wax coating that would impede airflow.
The department store paper bags, even if they are pure paper and colored brown, are often multiple layers that would block airflow too.
You can put citrus in tight proximity to a cut avocado, or guac, or avocado mash to halt oxidation better than oil. It won't really impact avocado but it will effect guac/mash - it will make your guac mushy and overly acid/citrusy, but it is possible to adjust for it, under-adding citrus to your batch when first making it, by reducing the liquid content added to your guac, and straining with a fine mesh strainer it to purge the extra citrus juice.
It is also possible to replace the citrus with vinegar if you prefer using vinegar for your guac instead of lime juice.
When I used to live in Southern California, there actually are several different varieties of avocadoes with many of them not available in other parts of the country. Some examples are hass, lamb hass, pinkerton, mexicola (where you can eat the skin), and reed avocadoes. Reed avocadoes are my favorite and are the size of 5 hass avocadoes combined with a very buttery mouth taste.. They can take up to 7-12 days to ripe at room temperature, but once cut open, oxidiation is minimal due to the fat content in the avocado.
I learned from a chef a while back to apply a thin layer of lemon juice to the smooth face of the avocado to prevent it from browning quickly.
I can usually pick a good hass based off skin tone and feel from the palm of hand if the skin is just beginning to pull away from the face when most ripe.
I tend to store it in the fridge to prolong its ripened state.
They are a daily use in my household for adding calories while more closely preserving the Keto ratio.
This is what I was looking for, in the article as well as comments. Lemon juice has also worked for me, especially in combination with the sealed plastic wrap, but I was not scientific about it and was hoping for some mention of testing this in the article!
The ascorbic acid in lemon juice is doing the work here. If you’d like read up on the science as to why it works the terms you need are polyphenol oxidase, which are the enzymes primarily responsible for browning in fruit and veg. Then also look into the Fenton chain reaction and how’s it’s interfered by ascorbic acid binding to quinones. It’ll probably be easier to find this if you focus on wine science, more so than fruit and veg in general.
I use lemon juice. It works, inasmuch as anything works.
I mainly use avocados to make guacamole, and my recipe includes lemon juice. If there's half an avocado left over, I splash lemon juice on, then wrap it in plastic film and refrigerate it.
I do this as well, and also with guacamole I’m going to hold, after putting it in a container I’ll smooth the surface, squeeze lemon/lime juice on top and press plastic wrap down onto it to keep a film of juice on the surface. Keeps it from browning and adds to the flavor for next time, when you can just stir it in.
While driving around Africa I was always buying avos from the side of the road and working on a system to always have one or two ripe.
To make them ripen as fast as possible - stick them in a plastic bag and put it in the full sun. You want them to sweat. They'll ripen in a single day if you get enough sun on them.
I've had good outcomes in determining whether an avocado was under-ripe by gently picking at the little nub where the fruit attached to the stem. That is more firmly attached when the fruit is under-ripe and as soon as it easily removes when picked at, I find the avocado is usually near perfect.
Here is the trick that changed my ability to store ripe Avis:
Put them into a container and submerge them under water. Than store the container at below 7 degree centigrade. That seems to stop the ripening process.
It does not work without water. Vacuum sealing also does not work.
The avocados we eat are all clones, right? The reason I ask is, it seems to me that avocado sellers ought to be prominently displaying the variety, but in my experience they don't.
Depends on where you are in the world. In SE Asia, we get some wacky varieties that greatly vary in size, shape, and flavor. I bought a few at a local market in Indonesia that were border-line zucchini like in shape and had a very watery flavor.
The avocados in stores are all Hass variety or almost identical variants (Lamb Hass). These replaced Fuerte variety avocados decades ago as they shipped better, gave more consistent yields, and the darkening skin gave consumers an additional clue to ripeness.
If you are interested in trying different varieties, there are many if you live in a growing region and have access to farmer's markets. In the US: California, Hawaii, Florida.
Related: in India, people put unripe green bananas in raw rice (uncooked rice), well covered by the rice, and leave them there for a few days to ripen.
Avocados are uncommon in that they _wont_ ripen on the tree. They must finish off the tree. Super convenient that you dont have to deal with them all at once, but inconvenient that you cant just decide to make guacamole and go pick some.
Whatever you thought you learned from wikipedia, forget it. The trick is not to use GM graft commercial varieties from ordinary grocery supply chains. If possible, get a graft from a mature noncommercial tree because it will produce fruit much faster than waiting 7 years or so to get fruit starting from a pit. Commercial pits can grow into trees, but their yields are bad because of evolutionary and GM pressures. As an experiment for kids, growing commercial pits
is fine but it will be more of a decorative and science project than a microfarming hack.
Because the ripe ones are very moldy, I only ever eat very green avocadoes, and the way I "eat" them is to pay some company to extract the oil from them and sell me the oil.
No, I'm not. the black veins are mold. Some edibly-soft avocadoes have much less black veins and black spots than others, but they all have some. Also by the time mold is visible, it is basically everywhere in the avocado.
But 5 out of 6 people can detoxify mold toxins, and those people can probably eat avocadoes without long-term problems.
None of that is correct. Ripe avocado's typically don't have any darks spots or "veins". Ones that are overripe or poorly stored can, but even then it's typically not mold, it oxidization. The "veins" are part of the structure, and thicker/woodier with late season, but not usually colored at all.
There is a fungal (again, not mold) infection that can happen from the stem end down, but that's rare and also not a harmful fungus for humans.
If there is actual mold on your avocado, you are storing them incorrectly or something.
This is an extremely niche solution, but when I need a bunch of perfectly ripe avocados, I order them from the Avocado Guy[1]. It's not that much more expensive than a grocery store (especially considering the avocados are usually on the large side), and they come perfectly ripe each time.
How is this article on the FP, even after 9 hours?
While the topic itself is an interesting discussion (and possibly the main reason it’s being upvoted), the TLDR of this whole article is basically:
- There’s no great way to shop for avocados
- You can sort of tell how ripe one is by feeling the “give” around the stem (though not a guarantee it’s a “good” avocado)
- You can ripen avocados faster in a bag (though still not a guarantee they’ll be good)
- You can’t really store them for later, once cut open
- You can’t really prevent browning
In other words, according to this article, buying avocados is a crapshoot, and if you happen to get a good one, consume it immediately once you cut it.
There is probably better advice in the comments here, but the article itself isn’t very optimistic or helpful.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
This is something you mom tells you the first time you buy avocados as a child. Wrap them in newspaper to ripen faster. Keep away from bananas to last longer. It's definitely not something that "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity".
Not if your local meat is fed with imported foods such as soy from South America, (which accounts roughly to 90% of soys fed to livestocks in the EU), and which is one of the biggest cause of deforestation.
Also Europe. Stopped eating meat long time ago. I also don't drive. Can I have an avocado and some fancy nuts, please? Do you really want to compare footprints?
And for storing a cut avocado, the press & seal plastic wrap works wonders. The trick is to not let air touch the exposed bit. If it does, then just slicing a thin slice off the top exposes the green part again. (This also works for frozen loaves of bread that have been cut - just a thin slice off the end gets rid of the bit that was destroyed by ice.)
My memoirs will include all my food storage tips for the perpetually single.