Should You Store Avocados At Room Temperature Or In The Fridge?

If you're a sucker for some creamy guacamole or avocado toast, having avocados on hand in your kitchen is a must. However, these fruits can be finicky if you don't store them correctly. So, should you keep them on your counter or tucked away in your fridge? Well, if they're not ripe, you should definitely keep them out.

Unripe avocados, which are what you'll usually find at the store, are hard and green, while ripe avocados will yield when squeezed lightly and have dark green or dark brown skin. Unripe avocados do best stored at room temperature because the refrigerator will slow down the ripening process. On a countertop, unripe avocados will take between four and five days to ripen, though they should be checked daily. The reason why avocados ripen slower in the fridge is because the cool temps and humidity control help slow the production of ethylene gas, which avocados and other fruits release. Ethylene gas hastens ripening, which is why you can ripen avocados with other fruit, as the extra gas will work to speed up the process.

On the other hand, if you have ripe avocados you need to keep fresh, you can store them in your fridge. However, they should be used within five days. The riper an avocado is, the sooner it will have to be used, so make sure to check it each day for overly soft, mushy flesh or signs of mold. If an avocado has a funky odor or flesh with black or brown spots when you cut into it, you're best off tossing it.

While keeping your avocados on the counter will help them ripen, if you want to speed things up, there are many hacks you shouldn't trust. Fortunately, the one that works best is quite easy; all you'll need is a brown paper bag. The reasoning behind using a paper bag to ripen avocados has to do with trapping ethylene gas as a way of kicking the ripening process into high gear. Paper bags are great for this, as they allow gas to be trapped, but still allow the fruit to breathe as they aren't airtight. If you tried this with a plastic bag, moisture wouldn't be able to escape as the fruit sweats, which will create a moist, mushy, bacteria playground.

For even faster ripening, you can add a banana to your avocado bag, which will speed up the process even more. This is because avocados are climacteric fruits, which means they are spurred into ripening once the levels of ethylene gas they're exposed to reach a certain level. Bananas are notorious for producing tons of ethylene, which is why their stems are covered in plastic at the store. So, when placed with an avocado, the extra ethylene gas from the banana will make things ripen extremely quickly, sometimes within two days, depending on how far along your avocado is.

If you have avocado halves you ended up not using, don't worry. There are ways to save them and prevent them from browning and going bad. However, they should still be used within a day or two. Ripe avocado halves can be wrapped in either plastic wrap or a reusable wrapper, like Food Huggers, to keep them fresh. You can also top them with a bit of lemon juice to slow browning, but as an experiment by HuffPost showed, this has a minimal effect at best.

While some people suggest storing avocado halves in water, this should be avoided at all costs because it creates an environment for the production of dangerous bacteria like Listeria and Salmonella, both of which the FDA has detected on avocado samples. It might look great as a hack on TikTok, but it definitely is dangerous in practice, and it's wholly unnecessary. Avocados that have browned due to oxidation might not be as pretty, but they're 100% safe to eat. Moreover, you can often cut off the browned top layer to find unoxidized flesh underneath.

Now, if you've cut into an avocado only to realize it's not ripe yet, you can save it the same way you would a ripe avocado half. Just wait for it to soften in your fridge, and make sure to check it regularly so it doesn't go bad.