Pitting an avocado safely

Pitting an avocado neatly and safely can be a little more difficult than it may seem. Don’t ask me how i know, I just do… 🙂  But with a few simple steps and some safety measures, you’ll be able to remove the pit without making a complete mess of your beautiful avocado or running for the first aid kit.

Begin by holding the avocado on a cutting board and slicing the entire fruit around the center length-wise.  Once you have done that, put your knife down to the side. Then with your hands gripping on both sides of the sliced avocado, gently twist your hands; one towards you and one away from you about a quarter of a turn, then pull to separate the halves.

Place the half of the avocado with the pit still in it on a cutting board.  Holding a sharp knife about 2-3″ over the pit, tap the pit just hard enough to wedge the knife into it. Holding onto the knife, pick it up, the avocado will (well it should…) come up with the knife. 

Place a towel or napkin in your hand and then place the skin side on top of that to grip the avocado.  Begin pulling up with the knife gently while twisting a little bit counterclockwise and the pit should lift right out.

Now for the tricky part, getting that darn slippery pit off of your knife! To remove the pit from the knife, use a paper towel to grab the pit (if the pit still has a lot of avocado still on it wipe it off a bit so you can get a good grip) then slowly and firmly pull down until it releases from the blade.

Please do NOT try doing this with your bare hand and without a paper towel! Or by pulling too strongly; you can easily wind up with an injury since the pits are so slippery.

 Now for the fun part, getting at that yummy avocado. You can do this one of two ways. If you are using the avocado to toss into a salad or to make guacamole, or any other use where you are not overly concerned about the size and shapes of the pieces, you can just use a spoon to loosen and scoop out the flesh of the fruit to remove it from the skins.

If on the other hand, you would like pretty avocado slices for a sandwich, or wrap, or to look really pretty fanned out on top of a salad…place the avocado cut side down on the cutting board. Cut a little bit off the end where the stem used to be attached, grab the cut part of the skin, crack it a bit with your hands and then you should be able to peel back the skin and completely remove it. Then you can slice it and dice it anyway you desire.

And there you have it… a quick and easy and SAFE way to get the pit out of an avocado.

I don’t know about you, but now I’m in the mood for some guacamole!