5 Useful Tricks That’ll Keep Your Avocados Fresh For Days

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

One of the great joys in life is eating fresh, ripe avocados. One of the great sorrows in life is seeing them turn brown and icky if you don’t eat them quickly enough. Some inventive folks made a video of an experiment to test how well nine traditional methods of preserving cut avocados worked.Here are five ways to preserve your

Here are five ways to preserve your avocados so they taste delicious and look appetizing for as long as possible.

Water Immersion

Immersion in water followed by immediate refrigeration for 48 hours, according to the test, is the absolute best way to keep a cut avocado looking fresh and beautiful. None of the remaining eight methods tested worked nearly as well as storing a cut, pitted half of an avocado submerged in water. The video did not show whether the water came from a tap or was bottled. Another advantage of this method is that water does not affect the avocado’s flavor.

Why does water work so well? The reason might not be the water itself, so much as the fact that the avocado is submerged in it. Exposure to air is what causes oxidation, the process of the avocado turning brown. Essentially, it’s rusting. By completely immersing the pitted avocado half in water, oxygen is prevented from getting to the flesh of the fruit, and so the avocado retains its lovely green color as if it had just been cut open.

By completely immersing the pitted avocado half in water, oxygen is prevented from getting to the flesh of the fruit, and so the avocado retains its lovely green color as if it had just been cut open.

Photo by Charles Deluvio on Unsplash

Lemon Or Lime Slice

The experiment results seemed to show that a pitted avocado half fared slightly better when covered with a lime slice than a lemon slice. Either or both of these juices are often squeezed into guacamole to add flavor and keep it looking fresh. Not surprisingly, the avocados tested with citrus fruit slices came out looking pretty good, though not nearly as good as the water-immersed avocado. It would be interesting to see the result of an avocado being immersed in citrus juice for two days.

Red Or Yellow Onion Slice

Onion slices don’t make avocados cry; they keep avocados looking reasonably fresh. If you don’t mind onion flavor mixed in with your avocados, this could be a useful trick to try. The avocado halves tested with this method came out looking about as good as the ones topped with citrus fruit slices.

Pit In Versus Pit Out

Mothers have long sworn that avocados stay fresher when the pit is left in, but the results of the avocado preservation experiment seemed to show that pit out is the way to go. This is counterintuitive because, if preventing air from reaching the flesh of the avocado prevents oxidation from occurring, pit in ought to do better than it appeared to.

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash

Brushing With Olive Oil

Again, by logic, this ought to work better than it seemed to. Brushing the avocado flesh with olive oil should have coated it enough to prevent oxygen from turning the flesh brown. The flat part of the avocado half did not look too bad, but the hollow part where the pit was removed had gone brown by the time the two days were up.

One final note: If your avocado does turn brown, you can slice off the brown bits and safely eat what’s underneath!