The reel from @celimamaskitchen opens with the question that is also in its caption: “Did I just ripen an avocado in 10 mins?!” The on screen headline says “I just ripened an avocado in 10 mins?!” over a shot of a halved avocado, and the caption answers: “This hack is APPROVED!!!”
The setup is a home kitchen at night. The creator holds up two hard avocados and says, in on screen text, “I have two avocados and I want to make guac tonight and they are hard.” She says she is going to try a hack: wrap the avocados in foil, place them in a bowl and pour boiling water over them. The caption gives the same steps: wrap the underripe avocados in foil, put them in a bowl, cover with boiling hot water, cover the bowl and let it sit for 10 minutes.
The frames show two foil wrapped bundles in a steel bowl as water pours in. After a “10 mins later” card, she lifts one out and unwraps it. “You can see that it’s steaming, right?” reads the text, followed by: “It looks like I just cooked the avocado but…” She sets the fruit on a board next to a cleaver and says, “let’s trust the process.” Pressing it, she says, “I mean it feels soft.”
Then comes the doubt she names herself: “But did I just cook the avocado rather than ripen it?” She cuts one open and the flesh is yellow green with a pale seed. Peeling it, she says, “Okay so it’s a little hot but okay well this well at least it peels easy.” The next card reads “Moment of truth,” and she scoops the flesh into a bowl and mashes it. Her verdict appears as “It tastes fine” and then “It worked.”
What the reel shows is that the fruit came out soft, hot to the touch and easy to peel, and that after mashing she wrote “It tastes fine.” It is one test of one pair of avocados.
The California Avocado Commission describes ripening differently. It says avocados ripen in a paper bag at room temperature, about 65 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit, which usually takes two to five days, and that adding an apple or kiwi, which give off the natural ripening hormone ethylene, speeds things up. It checks ripeness by a gentle squeeze and advises against using a microwave. The Commission does not address the foil and hot water method in the reel, so its microwave advice concerns a different heat method.
A cook who needs guacamole tonight can follow what she did: feel for softness, cut one open and taste it before committing the whole batch. A cook with a day or two to spare can use the Commission’s method of a paper bag, room temperature and a squeeze test.
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