Why You Should Grab A Dish Towel The Next Time You Cut An Avocado

Oh, avocados. My silly little Millennial heart sings for this tasty and ridiculously overpriced fruit, perhaps sensing some camaraderie. I know all the best tips for picking out good avocados at the grocery store and try out almost every avocado trend as it rolls out (grated egg avocado toast, anyone?), but up until quite recently, one basic thing eluded me. How to cut an avocado without it being a personal safety hazard. If you haven't noticed, round things are actually pretty dang hard to cut. Too loose of a grip and they'll drop right out of your palm. Too tight, and they could fire away from you at warp speeds the second your knife touches them. Fortunately, all you need to avoid the dreaded produce-cutting-caused urgent care visit is a simple dish towel.

The dangers of avocado cutting are two-fold. First, the fruit itself? Wildly round. So smooth, even with that slightly bumpy texture across its skin. Second, the knife. Cutting cleanly into a ripe avocado and removing that obnoxious pit demand a sharp blade. You want to do everything you can to reduce friction, which is where the dish towel comes in. Just nestle it in your palm and set the avocado on top, and you've not only reduced that friction like a charm, but you've also introduced a slight barrier that the knife has to get through before it cuts into you.

When reducing friction is the name of the game, your dish towel is truly unmatched. Not only can you use it to keep your hand safe, but you can also keep your avocado from flying straight off the cutting board when you remove the pit. Just place that same dish towel on your cutting board and place the avocado skin-side down and pit-side up on it. From there, you can give a single good hack into the pit, twist it side to side, and pop it right out without having to worry about the whole fruit wiggling around and escaping your grasp. With your newly — extracted avocado pit, you can make avocado seed flour – or just compost it like most of us, considering eating avocado pits is still a scientifically questionable choice.

You can even use a dish towel to steady your grip on the knife handle as you use it. If you're a sweaty palms kinda guy, this helps wick up any extra moisture and keeps your hand from slipping during the cut. Just make sure you use a short towel so you can actually see what you're doing. It'd be pretty tragic having to go to urgent care for an injury you got while trying to avoid going to urgent care, after all.