2 Freshness Hacks In 1: Store Cut Onions With Guacamole
Two-in-one hacks are some of the best when it comes to dining well. Using up the last of the jam in a delicious salad dressing plus you don't have to dirty an additional dish to make it? Sold! Making the most of a loaf of bread about to go stale by slicing and using it to soak up delicious chicken drippings? Delicious and useful. And using store-bought onions to keep homemade guacamole fresh? That's not just smart, and it's not just delicious — it's a downright game changer for those of us who have ended up with a dark green blanket covering our bright green guacamole after pulling it out of the fridge the day after those rare times we didn't scrape every last bit out of the bowl on the day we made it.
Unless that is, you use All Recipes' game changer of an avocado and guacamole hack. Bonus, it even cuts down on how many storage containers you need to use to store cut produce.
The Secret's in the Onion
Once an avocado is cut, it oxidizes pretty quickly. As Food Network explains, the oxygen turns the avocado brown because of an enzyme in the avocado. It's still totally safe to eat, but as anybody who has used a day-old avocado to top their morning toast will tell you, it's usually less than appetizing. The same thing goes for guacamole, which is why there are so many tips and hopeful tricks to stop the guacamole from rocking a rather unappealing brown hue.
All Recipes tested three of social media's most popular avocado-preserving hacks and one of the most successful ones was storing an avocado with a cut onion. Yes, it's as simple as it sounds. All Recipes tested this hack by putting a cut avocado in a sealed container (any food storage containers you already have in your kitchen should work just fine) with some cut red onions. The container then went into the fridge and the result was "surprisingly" effective. All Recipes reports the avocado was still its verdant self a full five days after being cut and combined in a container with the red onion. So naturally, since this worked for avocado, it should totally work for guacamole.
Holy Guacamole
All Recipes reports that the science behind the seemingly magic trick is the vapors that are released when the onion is cut. That's right, the same stuff that makes you cry when you're prepping French onion soup helps your avocado and guacamole to stay green for nearly a week.
If you haven't made the guac yet, this hack also works for when you're ready to make fresh guacamole. Just continue dicing the onion, mash the avocado right into it, and add your other ingredients like lime, spices, and cilantro (as long as you don't have the gene that actually makes cilantro taste like soap). If you use an appropriately sized container, you can probably make the guacamole right in that storage dish without even making anything else dirty. What's not to love about a trick like that? It's using what you would need for guacamole anyway to keep your avocado looking as delicious as the guacamole will taste. And for your next trick, we bet you'll make it all disappear in just one sitting.