This tasty and healthy fruit has been discovered by many gourmets. And not surprisingly – avocado contains a lot of vitamins and healthy, easily digestible fats, besides, its taste is neutral enough to make sauces and snacks on its basis. Here are some fun facts about avocados.
- The most popular dish made with avocado is guacamole sauce. It has Mexican roots and is made from mashed avocado pulp with lemon juice, hot pepper, tomato pulp and cilantro, seasoned with salt and ground pepper.
- In Mexico, soups are cooked with avocados, and second courses are prepared. Since avocado has a neutral bland taste, it adapts well to any set of foods, so it is often the basis for sauces, dressings, pates, cocktails and even ice cream.
- Avocado, despite its neutral taste, is tasty and nutritious. It does not contain fats that are not digested, it does not contain carbohydrates and it can be safely attributed to dietary and children’s products. It contains a minimum of sugars and no cholesterol. With all this, avocado is a hearty and high-calorie product, so you should not get carried away with it.
- An avocado tastes like a vegetable, but is considered a fruit. It grows on trees of the laurel family – the closest relative of the very laurel, from which wreaths were made in Ancient Greece.
- Avocado is also called forest oil – for the tenderness and oily pulp and alligator pear – for the similarity of the peel with crocodile skin.
- The name of the avocado was invented by the Spaniards, who were the first in Europe to discover this healthy fruit. And the ancient Aztecs called him a word that today would be translated as “testicle.”
- There are 400 varieties of avocados in the world – they all vary in color, size and weight. Avocados familiar to us are the average option, the weight of each fruit is about 250 grams.
- Harvest avocados when the fruits are ripe but not soft. The tree can store ripe avocados without shedding for several months.
- Determining the ripeness of an avocado is difficult. Leave the hard fruit to ripen – its pulp is hard and tasteless. Overripe fruit is mushy, so avoid buying soft dark fruits. You cannot store an unripe avocado in the refrigerator, it will harden even more. And half of the ripe one can be kept in the refrigerator sprinkled with lemon juice for several days.
- Cutting an avocado is easy, you need to draw a knife along the circumference around the seed, and then simply turn the halves in different directions – the avocado will easily split in half. Avocados, like apples, oxidize quickly, so be sure to sprinkle lemon or lime juice on the pulp.