Holy guacamole! How to ripen avocados in 10 minutes with an air fryer

An air-fryer can apparently ripen an avocado in 10 minutes. Photo / Getty Images

When you think of ripening an avocado, an air fryer is not the first thing that comes to mind.

But a mum has proved just how versatile the popular gadget can be after using it to help turn a hard avo into a ripe one.

Taking to the Facebook page Air Fryer Recipes Australia, the woman explained how the unlikely trick took just 10 minutes.

Instead of placing the rock-hard fruit in a low temperature oven to help speed up the ripening process, the mum decided to try her luck using an air fryer.

"Air fryers, is there anything they can't do?!" she wrote in the post.

"Tonight we had tacos for dinner and I couldn't find a ripe avo for the guacamole (typical!)

"I'd heard you can ripen them in the oven so I googled it and did it in the air fryer instead."

She said that while the fruit wasn't "super hard" it was still too hard to mash and admitted that the taste and texture had changed "a bit".

To help speed up the ripening process, a mum popped her avocado in an air fryer for 10 minutes. Photo / Facebook Air Fryer Recipes Australia

"I'd recommend that you let it cool in the fridge before using, but it bloody works!" she continued.

"I'd always rather a normal ripe avocado, but this works in a pinch."

She confirmed that the flesh of the avocado stayed a "normal green colour" and didn't go brown inside after being cooked in the air fryer.

Her handy hack has since gone viral, generating hundreds of comments from some of the more than 108,000 group members.

"We had the exact same situation happen! Thank you so much for this," one member wrote.

"Oh my gosh!" another added, while a third person said: "I'm going to keep this trick up my sleeve!"

To try the mum's air fryer avo hack, all you need to do is wrap the fruit in aluminium foil, place it in the tray, set the temperature to 200 degrees and the timer for 10 minutes – and hope that you have a ripe enough avo to eat straight away after the buzzer goes off.

Another handy way to help speed up the ripening process is to put an avocado in a brown paper bag with an apple or banana. It will bathe in its own natural ethylene gas, the chemical that causes it to ripen. But this can take up to three or four days.

It may take up to 7 days to ripen an avocado on the counter. To speed this up, place the avocado in a paper bag with a banana. pic.twitter.com/DrzR2Uk1xk

— YourCommissary (@YourCommissary) March 12, 2018