Avocados

I never tire of avocados. If my budget would allow, I could eat them every day.

I encountered and ate my first avocado in the mid-1970's when I was a student in California's Sonoma County. I remember stopping at a fruit stand and finding the new and peculiar fruit for sale at six for a dollar. (Imagine such prices today!) As a child, in the Midwest, I'd never seen, nor tasted, an avocado. If avocados were to be found amongst the produce shipped to Minnesota, my mother or father never brought them home. While avocados were once found only seasonally or very rarely in food markets, they are now available to us year round.

Avocados are native to Mexico. The ancient Aztecs called this luscious fruit ahuacatl. Spaniards called avocados, aguacate (or ‘alligator pears’), basing their name on the Aztec's, not (as I'd thought) on the fruit's bumpy skin. The British call an avocado a ‘butter pear,’ stemming perhaps from British schooners that sailed the Caribbean and took avocados on board to be used as "midshipman's butter."

The avocado is a (pear-shaped) fruit that tastes more like a vegetable. It is one of the world's few fruits that contain fat. And it does contain fat! An average-size avocado weighs in at around 335 calories, a large one about 370. Fortunately, most of the sapid mouth-satisfying fat in this vegetable-like fruit is of the good monounsaturated variety. Also, avocado's many calories provide lots of beneficial nutrients: protein, calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, iron, some B vitamins, as well as vitamin E.

Most of the avocados that make their way into our markets are raised in California or Florida. The most buttery and richest variety is the Haas. These are my favorite. They are the small, rough, dark, knobbly-skinned fruit that are in season in the spring and summer months. The Nabal is another variety. It can easily be mistaken for a Haas in that both the Nabal's and the Haas' skins are dark, almost black, when ripe. When unripe, both their skins are greener. The Nabal's skin is less deeply knobbled and the fruit is rounder in shape. If you are familiar with Georgia O'Keeffe's painting called ‘Alligator Pear,’ my guess is that her model was a Nabal. The Fuerte is the paler green and markedly smoother skinned variety of avocado that typically heralds from Florida. Fuertes flood our markets in the winter. Fuertes contain less fat. Correspondingly, they taste leaner and less richly sumptuous. Though I've never had the pleasure of eating one, I have read that there is also a delicious large spherical Hawaiian variety of avocado.

A perfect avocado should have consistent, unblemished skin without any discolored patches. When the fruit is ripe, and squeezed, there is a pleasant, soft give to the flesh. Besides the squeeze test, another litmus for gauging an avocado's ripeness is to try to gently flick the little round bumpy nub off the stem-end. If the fruit is unripe, the nub will not come off with a gentle push of the fingertip. If ripe, it will. Avocados will ripen easily on your countertop at room temperature. Though I've read that you can hasten the ripening by placing an avocado in a paper bag or a dark wool sock, my experience has only shown that avocados will ripen in their own time. If you need an avocado to ripen for a special meal on a certain date, my advice would be to buy several avocados that appear to be at different stages of ripeness. Since I often store bananas and avocados in the same place, I've noticed that bananas do seem to speed the ripening of avocados. If, in the future, I desperately need to hasten ripening, I'll close my avocados in a brown paper bag with some bananas.

Once an avocado has reached a ripe state, it can be kept in the refrigerator for a couple of days. While there is no harm in purchasing unripe fruit, there is no point in buying an overripe avocado. Overripe avocados taste like garbage. Throw them out or start a tree. When, in the spirit of parsimony, I've cooked with an avocado that has passed its prime, I've only regretted it—the aged avocado's garbagey taste permeated and compromised the dish's other ingredients.

Even though the skin is not eaten, after noticing how many people squeeze-test avocados in the store, I began washing avocado skin before cutting into the ripened fruit. The handiest method I know for preparing an avocado is to cut the pear-shape in half length-wise with a sharp chef's knife so that you cut in to and all around the pit; then rotate and pull the two halves apart. To remove the pit, carefully whack it so your chef's knife blade is imbedded about a half-inch into the pit, twist the knife, and the pit should slip right out. Though I've seen people peel an avocado half, why go to all that trouble? I slice or dice the halved fruit while the peel is attached, then use a soupspoon to separate the flesh from the shell by scooping the soft ripe fruit gently out. If you are not consuming or cooking avocado immediately, remember to squeeze fresh lemon or lime juice over all exposed fruit flesh. Avocado flesh discolors almost immediately when it is exposed to air. Contrary to what I've read and heard, I've never found that the pit detains the oxidation of leftover guacamole. It may delay the darkening of a leftover avocado half, simply by lessening the amount of surface that is exposed to air. I've found that acid (lemon, lime, or vinegar) and placing plastic wrap right next to the surface of the avocado does more for delaying the inevitable discoloration of an avocado's succulent flesh than a pit.

Warm Avocados with Tangy Topping

1 small red onion, sliced
1 garlic clove, crushed
1 Tbsp. sunflower [or olive] oil
Worcestershire sauce
2 ripe avocados, halved and pitted
2 small tomatoes, sliced
1 Tbsp. fresh chopped basil, marjoram, or parsley
2 oz. Lancashire or mozzarella cheese, sliced
salt and ground pepper

Gently fry the onion and garlic in the oil for about 5 minutes, until just softened. Shake in a little Worcestershire sauce.

Preheat the broiler. Place the avocado halves on a broiler pan and spoon the onions into the center.

Divide the tomato slices and fresh herbs between the four halves and top each one with the cheese.

Season well and broil until the cheese melts and starts to brown.

From The Complete Encyclopedia of Vegetables and Vegetarian Cooking by Denny and Ingram

Baked Avocado with Eggs

2 very large avocados
4 small eggs
dash of paprika
dash of celery salt

Preheat the oven to 350-degrees.

Cut the avocados in two, then remove the stone and break an egg into each cavity. (If the cavity seems too small to hold the egg, scoop out a little of the avocado's flesh.) Season with paprika and celery salt.

Bake directly in a 'bain-marie'* for 8-10 minutes or until the egg whites are just set.

Serve at once with a light tomato, basil, garlic, or cheese sauce.

From Visual Delights by Nathalie Hambro

*A bain-marie is a pan of water that is used to help mixtures such as custards bake evenly and to protect them from the direct heat of the oven… The water for a bain-marie is usually brought to boil on top of the stove; cold water would cause the food to cook too slowly. (This definition is excerpted from the glossary of one of James Peterson's wonderfully comprehensive cookbooks.)

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