How To Pick The Perfect Avocado, From New York City's Avocado Guy

We've all drooled over Instagram photos of blemish-free yellow-green avocados, but finding them at the grocery store can feel like a game of chance. Sometimes an avocado seems promising from the outside, but at home when you slice it open, the flesh is either too hard to eat or brown and bruised. How can you identify picture-perfect avocados without being able to peek inside? 

Miguel Gonzalez is here to help. As the supplier of the flawless avocados served by more than 150 restaurants in New York City, Gonzalez has pretty much mastered the art of the ripe avocado. Working with a partner in Mexico who selects prime stock from avocado farms there, Gonzalez monitors every detail of their transit to his warehouse in Queens, where he oversees the rest of the ripening process. By the time he delivers the avocados, they're at precisely the levels of color, firmness, and flavor that his clients request.

Check to see if there's a stem, the short brown stub at the top of the avocado. If it's there, nudge it with your thumb. Does it come off easily? If not, the avocado probably isn't ripe yet. 

If it does come off, check the color of the indentation it leaves behind. If it's a bright, fluorescent yellow or green, the avocado is ready to go. If it's moldy or black, that's not an avocado you want to buy. 

Look at the color. As a Hass avocado ripens, the color darkens from green to black. If it's a vibrant green, it's not ripe yet. If it's too ripe, the color will be very dark and there might be white spots on the skin. 

However, Gonzalez says, even if an avocado looks and feels ripe, it still might not be. Most avocados eaten in the U.S. are grown in Mexico, California, or Peru, and there's no way to know if they've been handled carefully on their journey to your grocery store. Many issues can arise along the way that could damage the avocado. 

For instance, if temperature fluctuations occurred in transit, the oil inside the avocado can actually "cook" its flesh. Gonzalez says if this happens, the avocado will go directly from being too hard to overly ripe.