How To Tell If An Avocado Is Bad - Without Opening It! - Food

In order to tell if an avocado is bad, the first thing you need to do is to check it from outside. To select the right avocado, you should consider the following:

• Color: A ripe avocado is dark green, with purple hues. A bright green avocado will be unripe and tasteless, while a dark brown or black avocado will be overripe or even rotten.
• Look: Check the avocado's skin for dents, cracks, breaks and spots. These are all signs of bad bruising or that the avocado is bad.

If the avocado passes those tests - and even if it doesn't as brown spots can be a harmless bruise - you can check its consistency. There are many varieties of avocado of different sizes and colors, but firmness is always a good way to tell if an avocado has gone bad.

Hold it gently on the palm of your hand and squeeze very, very gently: do not use your thumb or your fingertips, as you will bruise it. If an avocado is bad, it will yield too easily to pressure, hold marks, have mushy or hollow spots or even cave in. A hard avocado is unripe. The perfect avocado should be slightly yielding, but not soft.

An excellent tip to tell if an avocado is bad is to try and remove the stem or cap. If the avocado is ripe but not spoiled, the stem will come away easily and reveal green flesh.

If you see brown, it's overripe; if you see black or mushy flesh, the avocado is rotten and you should throw it away. On the other hand, if the stem doesn't peel back easily, it is still unripe and you should leave it for a couple of days. If you aren't sure whether the avocado is bad, a surefire way to know if it's spoiled is by using your other senses:

• Smell: a ripe avocado should smell slightly sweet. If the avocado smells musky, moldy or rancid, it's rotten and unfit to eat.
• Listen: when an avocado is overripe, the flesh loosens up from the pit. If you shake it and hear a faint rattling, it's not good anymore.

If your avocado has passed all those tests, or you want to make sure, now is the time to open it in half. A ripe avocado has green flesh, darker near the skin and lighter around the pit. Brown or grayish flesh means that the avocado is bad. Still, some discoloration around the pit is normal and not a sign of rot.

Sometimes, overripe or spoiled flesh appears in dark strings or spots, which develop from the top - near the stem - downwards, as you can see in the picture. Luckily, it's easy to cut those parts away and enjoy the rest of the green-colored avocado. If an avocado has browned after cutting it open, it is the result of oxidation, not of spoilage. You can cut away the top brown layer and save the rest.