So, you have a few bananas that are a little TOO green, or a bowl of avos a little TOO hard… What do you do?
Some fruit and veg science
Most fruit naturally produces a gas called “ethylene” which causes a fruit to ripen. It’s an invisible gas, but the more of it there is, the quicker your fruit ripens.
And, if some fruit starts producing the gas, other fruit will start producing more of it, and so it goes, increasing the amount of ethylene gas until the fruit is over-ripe and needs to be thrown away.
Certain fruits also produce more than other fruits, and some fruits are also more susceptible to ethylene than others.
For example:
– Avocados and Apples produce a lot of Ethylene and are highly susceptible to the effect of it
– Kiwi fruits don’t produce a lot of ethylene, but they are highly susceptible to the effect of it
Make your fruit ripen rapidly
How do we put this knowledge to good use?
We could speed up the ripening process by putting fruit in an enclosed container (something simple, like a paper bag). For example, placing your bananas and your avocados or apples together in the bag can cause the fruit to ripen rapidly.
Prevent fruit from ripening quickly
Of course, we could always do the opposite.
Ensuring the area where you store your fruit is well ventilated might help the fruit to stay perfectly ripe a little longer, as opposed to over ripening too quickly.
A little piece of useless knowledge that brought all this on is that apparently, in some supermarkets, bananas are kept separate from other fruit (or in sealed bags) to ensure it doesn’t speed up the process of ripening in the other fruit…
Scientific source: http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Ethylene-Gas.htm