That Viral Avocado Preservation Hack? It Works.
I feel like I’m constantly at war with avocados. I eat them a lot, but they have such a teeny tiny window where they’re perfect, it’s like I either need to be eating two a day, or going to the store three times a week, or just giving up and composting my overripe, gray avocados that I couldn’t manage to eat in time. Then I saw this TikTok:
@donutnpotatoe Damn you Tiktok!
♬ original sound - Danielle
I immediately trusted this person. I was all in on the water/avocado/fridge method. But then I went to the comments and saw SO many people proclaiming that this is a well-known trick, that their chef father has been telling them this for years, that this also works for lemons (trying that next). I was willing to potentially sacrifice a few avocados to see if this really worked (again, I already believed them, but you have to verify).
The short answer: It works like a dream.
How long was this avocado in the fridge? I don’t know. That’s not something I have to keep track of anymore.
The longer answer is basically just some tips i’ve come up with over the last few weeks. First, don’t put your avocados in the water right away. Wait until they are the perfect ripeness (ie, they are a little soft but not too soft) and THEN put them in the water. Basically, the fridge and the water put the avocados in stasis, so you want them to be perfectly ripe before you send them into hypersleep.
The container you use doesn’t really matter. I started off with this glass jar from Target. In the video they used a similar glass jar, and I din’t know if the glass or the airtightness was part of the magic trick, so I wanted to follow their lead as closely as I could. This is how I learned that this trick works just as described, and also that having as wide a mouth as possible to your container is imperative. I had to dump out icy cold water onto my hand each time I wanted to get an avocado. I could fit my hand into the mouth of the jar, but taking out an avocado and my own hand was difficult. I had an OXO Pop container I wasn’t using, so I tried that next. It was perfect!
It was during my avocado experimentation that the US Government decided to ban Mexican avocados. Then then un-banned them, but I had already written this post mentioning the upcoming avocado scarcity, so instead of rewriting, I’m adding this disclaimer.
It wasn’t like avocados immediately disappeared once the US banned Mexican avocados, and now I knew the trick for making avocados last for weeks. So I bought a lot of avocados. I’m still using my OXO Pop container, but now I’ve added one of these containers I got at the Costco Business Center (my new favorite store). I had to rearrange my fridge a little bit, and now I’ve turned it into an avocado cryogenic chamber:
It’s avocados all the way down
If you have the funds and the fridge space, and you are also worried that avocado scarcity will make most of your go-to meals impossible, I cannot recommend this tactic enough.
