Margaret shows how to cut an avocado without peeling it first. Twist the pit out with a knife, leave it in the unused half to prevent browning, then slice, dice, or scoop. Finish with lemon, salt, and pepper.
I'm going to show you how to cut an avocado, one of my favorite foods. The way to do this is very simple. So you know that the avocado has a nice big hard pit right in the middle of it. So what we want to do is cut around that pit, okay? Find the knife goes right in. This is a nice soft one. And then you open it up and normally— now if the avocado isn't quite ripe, sometimes it can be a little bit hard to pull Pull these apart. This one's nice and juicy ripe. So you'll see that you have the pit in one side. Now if I'm only going to use one half, then I'm going to leave the pit in the second half because that'll prevent it from going brown as quickly. From here is to cut. If I'm going to just do slices, I'm not cutting, as you notice, all the way through the skin. I'm just cutting to the skin. Okay? So I could leave it at that if I wanted nice long slices of avocado. If I just wanted to make an avocado— maybe I'm making guacamole and I don't actually need to have anything chopped. At this point, what you can do is take a spoon and spoon it out. So I could spoon it out before I cut it, I could spoon it out now. So if you see, I just go nicely along, and you see it comes out. I'm just going to cut half of these. You can see these come out. This is quite a ripe avocado, but it comes out in little slices. Or what I can do is crosshatch to dice. Okay? And then scoop that out, and it comes out already diced. Now, this avocado might not be the best example because it's a little, uh, it's very ripe, but you get the idea. What you don't need to do is you don't need to peel it and then cut it to it. I've seen people do that, and that just, that looks dangerous and hard. Here's a little tip that I learned. You can take a knife and just slice Smack it in there and twist the pit, and that's one of the easiest ways to pull it out. Okay? So if I didn't want to, you know, I will tell you one of my favorite snacks is a little bit of lemon squeezed right in. You know what? I'm going to do that right now. Here we have a little lemon. So you squeeze a little lemon right into it.
Nope.
Don't need that pit. And you do a little bit of sea salt. And you can throw some pepper on it. I don't even like pepper.
I do.
But you can just spoon it out. Oh my gosh, so good. Anyways, this makes a really great snack because it's actually fairly high in protein, it's got some good fats in there, it's gonna keep you satiated for a little while, it's a vegetable. There you go, avocados.
So here we are chopping a mango, not too different from the avocado that Margaret showed you. So what we're gonna do is, is I already know that a mango has a pit. Now you saw the avocado pit, Here it is right here, actually. It's, uh, it's pretty fat and small and round, um, very easy to cut around. With the mango pit, you already have to kind of know what size the pit is, and the mango pit is actually pretty— it's kind of like thin and big. So I already know that. So what I do is I find one end and I find the other end, and I know the pit's going to be going this way, so I'm going to cut it I'm going to cut it around where I think the pit is, and you can kind of feel it as the knife goes in, and you just kind of go around it. I'm going to do that on the other side as well. There we go. So the pit is inside right here, so you can kind of get a sense of how thin the pit is. You don't want to waste— there's a lot of mango meat right around the pit. You just want to Take your knife, or you can even just make a tiny slit, and then basically what I am going to do is I am going to pull, pull the skin right off. Now I can use my knife, or I am just using my fingers right now, and I am pulling the outside skin, and then once that is off, just start cutting around the pit. But so what you do then is a very simple way of doing it, is then you take the spoon, same spoon that Margaret had for the avocado, and I'm now going to do exactly the same idea as you would with an avocado. I'm going to scoop out the mango. There you go. So, all I have is skin left. Then I have the mango piece that I can eat, which is right here, and I can cut that up however I'd like. Now, if I want any wedges, I can do it.
