It’s easy to rush and buy the first avocado you see at your local grocery store. While they’re not considered a rare item by any means, they are particular and require the right amount of knowledge and patience for you to use them properly. Avocados have a small window (like, a couple of days) where they quickly pass from unpalatable, to delicious, to awful…and it’s important to be aware of it before you buy or eat them. Here are hacks to ripen avocados naturally and quickly.
Super Food Profiles believes that instead of buying soft avocados you should buy those that are a little hard, keeping them at home while you wait for them to be just right. You never know how long the soft and perfect looking avocados have been at your grocery store, handled by dozens of people who inadvertently ruin their pulps every time they squeeze them.
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There are many ways for speeding up the ripening process of avocados, but the best way is to have some patience. Still, for those occasions when you need to have an avocado ASAP, check out the following ripening methods.
Paper bag
The easiest way to jump start the ripening process is by placing your avocado inside a brown paper bag. This method will trap the ethylene gas that the fruit is emitting and accelerate the ripening process. You’ll see some progress after 24 hours.
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You can also try placing another fruit inside the bag – the most commonly used ones are an apple or a banana – to accelerate the process even further since they also produce ethylene gas. You’ll still need to have some patience since only circumstantial evidence suggests that putting fruits together will accelerate the ripening process.
Allow them to get some sunlight
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By this same reasoning, a slower yet more natural way of speeding up the ripening process of your avocado is to place it in a fruit bowl next to other fruit, in a spot where it receives some indirect sunlight. If you have several avocados and want to eat them every day of the week, you can stagger them closer or further from the other fruit depending on when you want them to be ready. The closer they are to other fruit the faster they’ll ripen.
What to do if you cut into an avocado and it’s unripe
If you cut open an avocado and discover that it’s still hard and not ready to eat, add a dash of lemon to it. Afterwards, put both halves of the avocado together with the seed inside and place it in a sealed plastic container with a banana or an apple inside. The next day, you might find a wild animal there, or it might work and your avocado will be ripe. If you want to be safe, it’s best to use the unripe avocado in a recipe that doesn’t demand a lot of texture and flavor from the fruit.
Never use microwave or oven
Some avocado enthusiasts believe that placing an avocado in the oven or in the microwave will speed up the ripening process, but this is not true. You might get burned and end up eating a tasteless lump of green. There’s no magical way of tricking nature, and avocados will be ready on their own time.
