How to Ripen Avocados Quickly

If you need to know how to ripen avocados quickly, you’ve come to the right place. This trick will allow you to use your perfectly ripened avocado in about 20 minutes.

I’m usually pretty good about meal planning every week, but sometimes things don’t go exactly as planned. I recently planned to make avocado quesadillas one Sunday night, which of course sounds like a great idea, except when you consider that we usually do our grocery shopping on Saturdays or Sundays. Now, as you and I both know, one cannot simply buy an avocado and just plan to use it that same day or even the next day in most cases. You need to closely monitor your avocado and change your meal plans based on its whims and when it feels like it’s time to be ripe. With this little trick, things are about to change, and if you get stuck with an unripe avocado at just the wrong time, this should help make things right, whether you need it for guacamole, avocado toast, tacos, smoothies, or some other indulgent-yet-healthy, nutrient dense dish.

How to Tell if an Avocado is Ripe

There’s a simple trick to help you tell if an avocado is ripe. Usually, I just give it a little squeeze to test firmness, but sometimes it can be hard to tell this way because of the firm outer shell. You also want to look at the color of the avocado. If the shell is still bright green, it won’t be ripe yet. If the shell has turned dark green-black, it’s probably getting close. If the shell is a dark purple-y black, you want to use it up right away because it’s probably getting close to over-ripe.

The other really easy trick to tell if an avocado is ripe is just to pop off the little piece of stem on the end. If it comes off easily and is green underneath, your avocado is probably ripe. If it’s hard to remove the stem, you’ll need the following method to quickly ripen avocados that you’re hoping to use in your recipe right away.

Here’s a little bonus tip: If you happen to have too many avocados that are all ripe at once, you can freeze them in your freezer to save for later! You might not think of avocado as being something that would freeze well, but this trick actually works so well, especially for any avocado recipes that involve mashing. Full instructions here: How to Freeze Avocado

Speeding Up Avocado Ripening

If you’d just like to encourage the avocados sitting on your room-temperature kitchen counter to speed up their ripening process just a bit, that can be easily done. Take an avocado and place it in a brown paper bag along with an apple or a banana. Apples and bananas both give off ethylene gas as they ripen, which in turn encourages the avocado to ripen as well. This effect will work if the fruits are simply near each other, but trapping the gas in a paper bag will be even more effective.

How to Quickly Ripen Avocados

Now, here’s how to ripen an avocado really quickly.

Start out with your lovely avocado, so full of promise but sadly not even close to being ready to eat. I don’t know about where you live, but most of the avocados we can buy in the stores here are nowhere near ripe, and it’s a total guessing game as to when they’ll actually be ready. I usually get a bag of five in my weekly grocery order and can start using them within a few days, but some ripen more quickly than others.

To start, preheat your oven to 350 degrees and wrap your avocado in aluminum foil.

Once your oven has heated up, place your avocado directly on the rack and leave it for about 20 minutes.

Remove it from the oven. It probably won’t be too hot, just pleasantly warm.

Remove the foil and slice into your avocado with a sharp knife.

Perfection!

Well, maybe not perfection, but pretty close! Definitely edible and usable in all of your favourite avocado-based recipes! The best method is to wait until your avocado reaches that perfect black/purple shell almost-over-ripeness, and the second-best method is this one.

I should mention that I’ve heard of others saying that you should place your avocado in a 200 degree oven for only 10 minutes. That was definitely not enough for my completely unripe avocado, but if you have an almost-ripe avocado, that would probably do the trick, just to give its ripeness a little boost.

How to Store Ripe Avocados

Once you’ve cut open your avocado, if you have any left that you’d like to save, you’ll want to store it in the fruit and vegetable crisper of your refrigerator for future avocado recipes. Replace the pit back into the middle of the avocado and wrap the whole thing in plastic wrap or store it in a sealed container with some onion to keep it from browning.

Now that I know this little trick to make avocado eating a lot less of a guessing game, I’ll definitely be using these even more often than I already do. Avocados are such a great everyday staple ingredient for so many recipes, and they’re so good for you too.