How to: Save an Avocado

Since I discovered that I like guacamole about 8 or so years ago, I’ve become quite attached to avocados.  I’ve even expanded my horizons into putting slices of it onto sandwiches and burgers, mashing it on paninis, putting it in tacos, making dressings, etc.  All really great things, but the more I expanded my horizons, the more I found myself with leftover halves of avocado.

How on earth do you save those things?  So after trying various methods, I finally decided to conduct and experiment and try three different methods at one time. I also included one half of the avocado as a control. My sister, the epidemiologist, would be proud, as no good experiment should lack a control group.

Here are the three methods I decided to try and how I treated the control. I picked what seemed to be the most popular methods after an statistical review of google search results.

• Control: All I did to my control avocado was wrap it tightly in plastic wrap.
• Onion trick: Place a chunk of onion and an avocado in a container and keep in the fridge. Apparently the gases released by the onion will stop the avocado from turning brown (for a while).
• Leave the pit in: This method saves the half of the avocado with the pit. I wrapped it in plastic wrap as well.
• Lime juice: squeeze some lime juice on the avocado. I also wrapped this one in plastic wrap.

Here’s what they looked like when I put them in the fridge (obviously there was a lid on the container with avocado and onion.

After one day here is what my avocados looked like:

And here is after two days:

Results:

• Control: this one was a tie with the onion for the best. I was surprised at how little browning happened with absolutely nothing done. The flesh also still had good texture.
• Onion: I thought this one looked about the best and the flesh was also still firm.
• With the pit: this one was the brownest on the surface, but when I removed the pit the piece that wasn’t exposed to air it looked nice and fresh.
• Lime Juice: this one had more of a grayish/brownish color throughout and less really dark brown spots than the others, but it also had slimy feel on the top.

Verdict – They all tasted just fine when I mashed them up into guacamole after the experiment was over.  I’ll probably use the onion trick from now on, even though the control was just about as good I felt like this was just a little better.  Maybe sometime, I’ll try these two methods for longer than 2 days and see what happens.