Guacamole - how to make it

I don't think cilantro is coriander.

EDIT: Upon looking it up, apparently it is.

So I am not so bought with the bananas giving of heat theory, but I could go with you on the water vapor.

OG may be going along the right road with the chemical RXN thing.

So is it just bananas or would any other fruit do then?

These are the things that keep me up at night!

I put mine in a brown paper bag with apples. Something about the apple gas makes em ripen. A veritable dutch oven if you will I suppose.

ps: If you have a load of leftover fresh coriander you can make pesto out of its same as you would with basil. Gives a nice summer taste to pasta or a good dip for quesadillas.

Yeah, its something to do with ethylene. I just tried to find out if it is bananas which should be ripened with avocado, or the other way round. Seems both.

Much more interesting is that the yanks invented the word avocado, because the native aztec name was too hard to pronounce. Ahuacate is the name, and means testicle.

I'm afraid you have just turned me off guacamole for a while - chopped testicles with tomato, onion and lime/lemon citric juice on nachos ... brrrrrrrrrrrrr!

Green mashed-up testicle.

Avacado was a better choice.

but the spanish kept it (aguacate) and north america was invaded by both brits and the spanish (okay, french too but i don't know what avocado is in french).

EDIT: i should rephrase my statement. the first peoples to probably come in contact with "testicles" were the spanish. so we english speakers probably got the name from them. and who were the first english speakers in north america ... yanks? pah.

Avocat.
(Gay wiki link specially for don_riina)

Avocat also means lawyer in french.

So help me get this straight. I was never very good at Maths but I think this is what Wahoo is trying to say:

Ahuacate = Testicle = Avocado = Avocat = French Lawyer

then that leads us to the conclusion that all French Lawyers = Testicles.

Until the early 1900s, the ahuacate had never been grown commercially in the United States. By 1914, however, hotels in Los Angeles and San Francisco were ordering as many of the fruits as they could and paying as much as $12 for a dozen.

But the farmers faced a marketing problem. First, ahuacate was too hard for Americans to pronounce. Worse, it was the Aztec word for testicle, named for its shape and reputation as an aphrodisiac. Then there was the other unappealing name: "alligator pear."

The farmers came up with a new name: avocado. They informed dictionary publishers of the change -- and that the plural was spelled "avocados," not "avocadoes" -- and named their own group the California Avocado Association.

The approach worked. Today, California accounts for nearly 90 percent of all avocados grown in the United States.

Cannot put a link, because my dodgy IE7 beta is pissing me about with pop up windows, even though I've disabled them

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5563805

Strange, but that is what they call it around here. For those that don't know, it is the leaves like parsely and not the ground stuff in a jar that you use in curries.


Most fruits are sprayed with ethylene to ripen them. That is why you don't store fruit together. They will affect each other. Some are sprayed more than others.

You can put an avocado in flour to ripen it. Works overnight.

To check if they are ripe in the store, look at the stem and make sure that it isn't dried out the skin isn't pulling away from the stem. Poke it by the stem and see if it is soft there and on the opposite end. If it is soft on both ends and not dried out around the stem then it is ripe and not rotten. The skin should also be a bit darkened and not shiny green. If you are unlucky and get one that is ripe on the outside yet still hard on the inside, then puree the shit out of the hard part or go buy another one.

Yeah, I think the europeans name the entire plant coriander, whilst in the States, the plant, leaves, root & stem is cilantro, and only the seeds (dried, usually crushed) are called coriander.

Guacamole is best made with love and a loving partner; failing that, it's best bought in a 16oz plastic cup at Vons.

I knew that one.

That makes sense. I was only familiar with cilantro as a leaf and coriander as a seed but now I know.

Anyway in case you are all dying for an update:

We went the compromise route and used the juice of one lime and one lemon. In retrospect I don't think it made much difference and both work well althought I'm willing to concede that lime is probably more authentic mexican than lemon.

Regardless, the guacamole tasted fantastic and we all lived happily ever after.

Actually it is both, depending on the recipe

Coriander seeds in guacamole?!? Sounds gross to me.

Nah. I was referring to the comment that only ground coriander leaves are used in curries

And now we know why:

(near Nerja, Spain)