Trial Tuesday: Methods for Quickly Ripening An Avocado

For those of you who already don't know, I decided not to continue with Non-Fat Tuesday, so here is my very first post to Trial Tuesday! To recap, Trial Tuesday is me trying out different methods for questions that I have for the internet.

Do you know what is the worst? When you plan to make guacamole and the avocados are not ripe enough when you need them to be. Let me just start by saying that I bought my avocados a week in advance and they still looked like the stock image above after 5 days. So, I went to the internet. I found two methods that were "guaranteed" to work so I chose one and used the other as a backup.

Method One
Brown Paper Bag Method

Like bananas, avocados release gases that naturally ripen the fruit on its own. When you trap the gases, it is said to ripen the fruit faster.

The method is simple, just put the avocado in the bag. After two days, my avocado looked like this:

I had a brown spot! But it was still solid so I went to method two.


Method Two
Baking the Avocado

I found this method on YouTube. I both curious and desperate to try it out. I will admit, I was scared of cooking the avocado so I watched it closely.

Directions:

1. Wrap your avocados in aluminum foil, just as you would to bake potatoes. Put them on a pan or cookie sheet.

2. Preheat your oven to 200 Degrees Fahrenheit.

3. Place avocados in oven for fifteen minutes.

You CAN overcook these so be sure to not exceed the temperature and check every few minutes after 10 minutes of cooking. You are looking for the same softness you would want in a naturally ripened avocado.

My Results:

Time Cooked (Minutes)	Avocado Status
10 Minutes	Rock Hard
12 Minutes	Rock Hard
15 Minutes	Rock Hard, warm
18 Minutes	Rock Hard, warm

Here is what my avocado looked like after 18 minutes. The green was starting to blacken.

While it was still hard, I was hopeful that it would have done something on the inside, but NO!

Modified Trial

Baking at a higher temperature

I ended up turning the oven temperature up to 275 Degrees Fahrenheit to see if that would help the avocados ripen faster. I re-wrapped them in foil and put them in the oven for 12 minutes. This gave me a total cook time of 26 minutes (18 min. at 200 Degrees and 12 min. at 275 Degrees).

When checking at the ten minute mark, I had some soft spots! Excitement. Here is what the avocado looked like upon removing it from the oven after 12 minutes:

 

Success??

NO!!!!! It was still hard even though it had some soft spots and the outside was black. The seed was steaming and discolored when it came out, too.  Both methods were a fail! 

**Have you ever tried either of these methods? Or, do you know a method to ripen avocados that actually works? Leave it in the comments below. Thanks for reading!**