Don’t Rush the Avocados
One evening last fall, my wife turned to me and asked to pick up avocados on my next shopping run. The next day, after a heavy wind, I looked in our backyard and at least a dozen avocados had fallen from our neighbors tree. It was literally a windfall.
Most of those avocados would perish in horribly different ways.
The problem was that the avocados were hard as rocks and it felt like it would be a long wait before they’d be ready.
The first batch of avocados was stuffed in a plastic bag and sealed with a knot. Within a few hours, the first drops of condensation appeared on the inside surface of the bag. After a few days, the hardness didn’t change. Then one morning, I awoke to find them covered in mould. Still hard.
The second batch was placed on a cooking tray and put in the oven at 60 degrees Celcius overnight. When I opened the oven door in the morning, blackened avocados greeted me. They were still hard and tasted like potatoes.
The third batch was another bag attempt, this time with a banana. Instead of three days to grow mould, both the banana and the avocado became fetid within a day.
OK, it’s oven time again. This time 40 degrees Celcius overnight. Darkened, the avocados remained hard. Leaving them in for another day, I gave them the same fate as the other oven batch.
After about a week and a half of experimentation and losing a dozen avocados in the process, I went back to the original bunch of avocados and sure enough, one was soft. It was beautiful and ripe, the knife sliced smoothly through it, the pit popped out effortlessly, and it tasted creamily divine.
You can’t rush the avocados. You have to let them ripen on their own. Sometimes, that’s the case with other processes too.
