Well, the avocado eaters in Thailand are used to gambling with their purchases, but this is ridiculous.
My last three bags of local (non-Haas) Thai avocados have yielded 100 percent wastage. All went directly from hard to rotten. No even a tiny window of ripeness.
So these bags in Pattaya generally cost 90 to 100 baht for four or five quite large fruits. The message I’ve taken is that in this particular season there is no point in buying these bags anymore. Frankly, even in the best of seasons, it’s very rare for all of the fruits to turn out to be edible, but sometimes the ratio is high enough.
The alternative of course is to buy imported avocados at about 65 to 95 per smallish fruit. The odds on those are better but not 100 percent.
This isn’t really new. It happens every year. But the reason I’m posting is that I recently saw a video from a U.S. avocado grower explaining why this is happening in Thailand. He said it’s because the Thai growers are picking the fruits too early (this came up in his reply to a commenter from Thailand). When that is done, apparently, their fate is doomed. I also learned something surprising. Before I had thought that the reason for the avocado horrors in Thailand was because the fruits were refrigerated while still very hard (even if displayed outside the fridge). It turns out that according to this grower it’s totally OK to refrigerate them while still hard (but not freeze of course!). In fact he suggests that as a strategy for home use.
Of course there could be other reasons for the problems here. Perhaps they do freeze them. Perhaps the trees are infected in some way. I don’t know.
In other words suppose you got a package of five very hard unripe fruits. He suggests keeping some out and refrigerating the others. Then as you need them, take new ones out of the fridge and give time to ripen. The fridge stopping the ripening process. The theory being that if your package contained fruit picked at the same time, they would ripen all at the same time if left out, giving you too much at once.
Another tip to preserve half eaten fruit. Clingy plastic wrap!
This content was originally published here.