How to become an avocado whisperer and find the perfect avo, every time
By Sam Downing|
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Avocados are a nutritious treasure trove of healthy fats, fibre and vitamins that can be added to just about any meal.
But they're also hideously expensive — which is why it's so devastating to spend $5 on one, only to cut it open and discover its flesh is a dismal zombie grey, or waste it because you tried to eat the hard fruit before it was ripe.
Luckily, you only need to know a few simple tricks to become an avocado whisperer and the envy of your friends.
Choose wisely
Supermarket avocados are mostly likely to be the Hass variety (named after Rudolph Hass, the US postman who first cultivated them). They're the ones with the lumpy, pebbled skin that makes you see why the avo is nicknamed the "alligator pear". (Most of the advice here is about Hass avocados, FYI.)
According to Avocados Australia, a Hass is at optimum ripeness when its skin is "purplish black" and it feels soft when you squeeze it in your palm. (Soft is good. Squidgy is bad — that probably means it's too ripe.) Don't squeeze too hard or you'll bruise the fruit.
You can also get a sneak peek inside an avocado by peeling back its stem, that cute li'l button at its narrow end. If the stem pops out easily and there's healthy green flesh inside, that avo is good to go. If the stem resists, it needs a little more time to ripen.
Hass avocados account for 80 percent of Australia's avocados. The next most common variety is the Shepard avocado. To make things confusing, a Shepard's skin doesn't go darker as it ripens — it stays the same shade of bright green. But you can still rely on the softness test to judge whether it's ripe.
DIY ripening
Left in a fruit bowl on a kitchen benchtop, most uncut avocados will ripen within two to three days.
If you want to ripen your avocado faster, expose it to ethylene gas before you cut it open. You don't need a chemistry degree to do this: just pop your avo in a brown paper bag with a banana. Bananas naturally release ethylene as they ripen.
Microwaving for 10 seconds is another (untested) suggestion for softening up an avocado.
So what do you do if you cut open an avocado early, only to find it's still too hard to eat (aside from collapse to the floor in tears)? The Hass Avocado Board recommends sprinkling the exposed flesh with lemon or lime juice, placing the two halves back together and covering them tightly with plastic wrap, then putting it back in the fridge. Your avocado might end up a little slimy from the juice, but still edible.
RELATED: How the avocado came to Australia
Avocado love and care
Simon D, Flickr
If you have a ripened avocado you're not ready to eat, put it in the fridge before you cut into it — this will slow down the ripening process for another two to three days.
Once an avocado has been cut, its flesh will start to turn brown as it oxidises. If you're not too fussy, you can just scrape off the top layer of yucky bits to reveal the green flesh underneath.
But after a day or so the whole avocado will probably go nasty. To keep an avocado in the fridge for another two to three days, try sprinkling it with lemon or lime juice. Warning: this can make your avocado turn slimy and weird-tasting. The Kitchn recommends instead placing it in an airtight plastic container with a cut-up piece of onion, which reportedly keeps it fresh for several days.
You can also freeze avocados, but they'll store badly unless they've been pureed into a guacamole-style mash.
Shepard avocados have an advantage here: they don't go brown in the fridge, and stay greener in sandwiches and salads.
Cut it right
The best way to slice open an avocado is to cut it lengthwise around the seed, then rotate the halves to separate them.
But avoid then extracting the flesh by scooping it out with a spoon, because you'll miss out on the nutritious carotenoids in the rougher flesh fastened to the avocado's inner skin.
Instead, gently peel your avocado... although admittedly, this method takes way more time and is annoyingly difficult if the avo isn't just right.