Buying fruit at its exact point of ripeness is a complicated task. We often find ourselves in the fruit shop, market or supermarket and the fruit that we like so much is overripe or completely green. In the first case, there are few things we can do to take advantage of it, except for some recipes such as banana bread in the case of ripe bananas.
What we can save are the fruits that are still green and accelerate their ripening process at home. To do this, simply mix these unripe fruits with other specific types of fruits.
Mariana Zapién is a food engineer and on her TikTok profile (@ingdetusalimentos, with more than 400 thousand followers) she disseminates information related to this matter. Among her content, we find a video where she reveals a series of cooking tricks that work according to science. One of them explains how to gather fruits so that they ripen faster.
The trick to giving a boost to the ripening process of some fruits lies in mixing it with other specific fruits. “When you want to make your avocado ripen faster, you can put it next to a ripe banana, a tomato, an apple, another avocado, etc.,” says the expert. “This is because this type of fruit, after being harvested, continues to respire and emit considerable amounts of a gas called ethylene and this gas stimulates the ripening of this type of fruit,” she explains.
In fact, beyond combining them together in your fruit bowl, the tip works even better if you wrap them in paper, to preserve the ethylene in that environment and make the fruits ripen faster. Of course, Mariana Zapién clarifies that this trick only works to ripen certain fruits: mango, apple, avocado, peach, nectarine, grapefruit, melon, watermelon, tomato, pear, banana and papaya.
It should be noted that this advice can also be interpreted in reverse. That is, if you have a fruit that is already perfectly ripe and you don’t want it to turn soft before you can consume it, it is better to avoid putting it in your fruit bowl with apples, avocados, tomatoes or bananas.
In the same TikTok video, Mariana Zapién delves into the trick of putting an egg in a glass of water to know if it is in good condition. If the egg sinks, it is fresh, while if it floats it tells us otherwise. This is because “as the egg ages, part of the water in it evaporates, making this air chamber much larger,” notes the expert, adding that “as the egg ends up having a lot of air and the “Air is less dense than water, when you place it in water it will float, which will indicate that the egg is not fresh.”
Finally, the food engineer reveals that soaking legumes not only helps them cook faster, but also reduces the gases caused by their digestion. This is because legumes contain oligosaccharides, compounds that our body cannot digest and cause gas. When we soak them, part of these oligosaccharides migrate to the soaking water, reducing their concentration in the legumes.
