This Fruit Is The Secret To Ripening Avocados Quickly

Uh oh. You were planning to make guacamole for a party tomorrow, but your Instacart shopper got you all unripe avocados. Short of driving out and buying already-ripe ones (who has time for that in their busy day?), what can you do? As it happens, the answer may already be on your counter.

If you're confronted with this situation, try putting your unripe avocado in a brown paper bag with a banana or two. If you're ripening multiple avocados, you will require multiple bananas, as well as a bigger bag (like a brown paper grocery bag, versus a lunch bag). Then all you can do is wait. If you're ripening totally unripe avocados, expect this trick to take about two days. However, if they're already starting to soften up a bit, this process can take as little as 24 hours to a day and a half. To check, give the bottom of the avocado a little squeeze to test for ripeness.

Bananas aren't the only fruit that can help with this method. Some have found that apples work just as well (if not slightly better), and others have tried the same technique with kiwi, though with less efficacious results. Another way to further boost your avocado's ripening is to put both fruits into a closed paper bag and sit it in a sunny window. The heat from the sun will speed up the process.

Why does a banana in a paper bag help an avocado ripen? While it might feel like magic, it's actually science. You see, certain fruits — like avocados, bananas, and apples, but also peaches, mangoes, and even tomatoes — produce ethylene gas, a naturally occurring plant hormone that does much to regulate ripening (and also controls the fruit's physical characteristics, such as texture, color, and odor).

When fruits containing ethylene gas (known as "climacteric" fruits) are in the company of other fruits that also contain ethylene gas, the riper fruit essentially tells the less ripe fruit via ethylene gas that, hey, it's time to kick it into high gear — especially when they're confined together in close proximity, like in a closed paper bag. While bananas have been found to be only moderate ethylene gas producers, avocados are particularly sensitive to the gas, making teh two perfectly matched.

If you're really pressed for time and you have an unripe avocado situation, you might be tempted to try one of the hacks floating around the Internet for super-fast ripening — or at least softening — of the fruit. Both have to do with using heat to your advantage (which isn't too far off, as we just suggested putting your bagged avocado in a sunny window). The oven method calls for wrapping the avocado in aluminum foil and then baking it for about 10 minutes at 200 degrees Fahrenheit.

The microwave method has you slice the avocado in half, pit it, wrap the two halves separately in plastic wrap, and microwave the pieces at 30-second intervals until it's soft. While we've given you the instructions, we cannot in good faith recommend that you actually try either of these methods. Do so, and you'll likely be left with an avocado that is certainly softer, but lacks the rich, creamy flavor and texture of a naturally ripened fruit.