Sometimes I give myself a few days between deciding to make a recipe and actually getting around to doing it. Other times, like tonight, I decide what tonight’s meal will be around 430pm while cruising the grocery store. This can lead to some issues if recipes require ingredients to be in a certain state (read: ripe). Today, I decided I would make two very avocado heavy dishes for dinner, only to discover that my sub-par grocery store only had the rock hard unripe variety of avocado. “Not to worry!” I thought. I had recently seen that how-to video to ripen avocados in ten short minutes. “I’ll just do that!” I said while walking out of the store. Do you know where this story is going yet?

I arrive home and do a quick internet search to make sure I have all the details correct. It seemed pretty straight forward: wrap each avocado in foil and place in the oven for 10 minutes at 200F. Ten short minutes to perfectly ripe avocados. So, I did just that.

Hmmmm…ten minutes later and you wouldn’t have known they were supposed to be ripening. Twenty minutes later, same thing. Thirty minutes later and they were still rock hard. Up went the oven and back in went the avocados. 45 minutes later, with the oven up to 300F they started to feel as though they were considering ripening. At about the hour mark they finally felt ripe. At that point, I needed them right away for both of my recipes and proceeded to pretty much burn both of my hands while attempting to scoop them out. Good times, good times.

So that avocado hack was too good to be true. Just be prepared and have ripe avocados on hand for when you need them. However, if you’re anything like me, your avocados will seem like they’re never going to ripen so you’ll put off making a specific recipe. Then they’ll ripen beyond use in the span of about 6 hours.

I did not take this picture.