The Smartest Way to Keep an Avocado Fresh for up to a Month
Buying avocados is always a little crappy: they tend to ripen at unpredictable intervals, and that fleeting moment of ripeness comes and goes before you’ve had a chance to eat them. Of course, you can freeze them , but that means changing the texture, which may not always work the way you want.
According to a Facebook post that’s been getting a lot of attention lately, it’s possible to slow down the ripening process, which means you can keep your avocados fresh for up to a month, if not a little longer. That’s a lot of time to use up that box of avocados you bought at the farmer’s market on a whim when the wholesale price was too good to pass up.
How to make avocados ripen more slowly
As a Facebook user wrote: “Avocado stays good for life if you put it in water in the fridge. They lay there for two damn weeks while the control group on the tabletop rotted.”
As you can see from her photo, she was able to store whole avocados in the refrigerator for several weeks by immersing them in water. As reported by The Kitchn in a recent article , this hack was confirmed by several people on Twitter, including writerAshley Ford .
In another article published by Southern Living , they tested the hack a little further, comparing it to storing avocados on the counter or in the refrigerator, but not submerging them in water. Storing avocados in water in the refrigerator significantly increased the time it takes to ripen, they said. Avocados on the counter spoiled the fastest, avocados stored dry in the refrigerator took a little longer, but avocados stored in the refrigerator in water stayed fresh longer.
How to speed up the ripening of avocados
The difficulty with buying multiple avocados is the lack of control over how fast they ripen. Putting them in water in the refrigerator slows down the ripening process, but there will be times when you may need to speed it up a bit, especially if you want to eat them for several weeks.
If you keep a batch of avocados in the fridge and want to use them within a couple of days, you can speed up their ripening by taking the avocados out of the fridge and placing them in a paper bag with the fruit. The fruit will release ethylene gas, which will make the avocado ripen much faster.