Avocados are a wonderfully varied ingredient. They’re delicious in salads, on toast and even in smoothies. However keeping them ripe can be challenging.
Avocados can ripen quickly and brown before you know it and there’s little more frustrating than cutting one open just to see it’s past it. If you love avocados and want to keep them fresh for as long as possible, there are a few things you can try.
Lily Keeling, Senior Recipe Development Manager and Registered Nutritionist at Green Chef UK shared her expert tips for avocados with The Express.co.uk – and warned against one popular storage hack that can make you very sick.
If you have a perfectly ripe avocado and want to keep it like that to use later in the week, Lily says the best way to pause the ripening process is to store it in the fridge.
She said: “Storing ripe avocados in the fridge will give you a couple of days extra life and slow down the ripening process.”
One popular hack for keeping ripe avocados from ripening further is storing the in an airtight container filled with water in the fridge. However, Lily warns this method is very dangerous.
She said: “Storing avocados in water could increase pathogenic bacterial growth that causes food poisoning, I wouldn’t recommend storing them in this way.”
Simply popping them in the fridge will give you a few extra days, and won’t run the risk of ruining your week with food poisoning.
Once you’ve decided to eat your perfectly ripe avocado, if you can’t finish it all, you won’t want to just throw it away. To save your cut avocado, Lily has a couple of options.
She said: “Oxygen is what causes the reaction that makes avocados go brown, stopping the oxygen contact by using an airtight container, clingfilm wrap or by coating in olive oil or lemon or lime juice will prevent and delay browning.”
If you’ve picked up an avocado that isn’t quite ripe enough, but you want to use it as soon as possible, the best way to speed up the ripening process is to store them at room temperature, and next to one other fruit that can help the process along.
Lily said: “The best way to speed up the ripening of avocados is by storing them at room temperature and next to bananas. Bananas release ethylene, a gas that triggers the ripening process in other fruits, including avocados.”