36 Fruit Hacks Every Home Cook Should Know | Epicurious 101

Today I'm sharing fruit hacks. These are the hacks that I learned throughout my years in the kitchen. I teach these to my students and now I'm gonna share them with you. I love bananas. And if you have bananas that are gonna sit on the counter at room temperature, the best way to slow down the ripening is to take something and wrap up the stems. Bananas give off a gas that lets them ripen, but this is gonna stop that gas from coming out of the bananas and it's ripening slower. So say you have a bowl of fruit and this mango, it's a little on the under-ripe side or maybe the avocado needs to get a little softer. Bananas' gas help other fruits ripen. So if you want things to ripen faster, put it with a banana. If you don't, keep the bananas far away in a different space. Have you ever noticed that sometimes when your fruit has been sitting around a while, you start to get the little fruit flies buzzing around? Keep your wine corks, put them in with your fruit. Natural wine cork will absorb some moisture from the fruit. It also releases a scent that the flies don't like. I do this at home. I put a couple of corks in with my fruit basket and I never have problems with flies. I know everyone's had this issue before. You have bananas that are going dark and I've seen people just take the bananas and put them in the freezer. Have you ever tried to peel a frozen banana? It is a pain in the rear end. So what I do, I peel them first and they go into a Ziploc bag. Lay them flat, don't pile them up and you can take one banana out at a time. When I'm ready to make banana bread, I take the bananas out of the freezer first and put them in a bowl and by the time I collect my other ingredients, they're ready to go to make the bread. When you're choosing citrus fruit for maximum juiciness, the smooth limes always give off more juice than the bumpy ones. Bumpy lime first. Now we do the smooth lime. You can see the difference. The bumpy lime, the firmer one and then the other lime definitely gives off more juice every single time. One of the things I like to do when citrus is abundant and cheap is squeeze it and freeze it. You get that really nice hit of lemon without any of that kind of cooked or old taste flavor. Once they're frozen solid, pop them out into a Ziploc bag and anytime you need a little pop of lemon, if I'm making like a pan sauce, pop a cube out and you're good to go. I love citrus fruit and one of the ways that we used to cut it in restaurants to make it a little fancier is called the Supreme. This is mainly for a garnish, for a salad or for something on like a ceviche. So I have an orange and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna cut off both ends and then peel the orange leaving no pith. The white part is the pith and it tends to be like a little spongy, sometimes a little bitter. You don't want any of that white stuff on the outside of our orange. The knife is a small paring knife. I'm kind of slicing or sawing around. That sawing motion helps you cut faster. You can see that there's a natural separation. I cut down alongside of it and then I cut down on the other side. And once you get the first slice out, you can just turn your knife and they pop out. If you're not comfortable with that, just make the V cut. I always feel like cutting fruit for people is a severe act of love. If you do this for the people in your life, they'll be like, oh my gosh, this person must really like me, but it's just gorgeous. In front of me, I have a bunch of mandarin orange peels, but you can do this with any citrus peel. I'm gonna make a cleaning solution. Don't throw them away. You can save them. And I'm just gonna stuff them in a jar, pack them in pretty good. And then I have some white distilled vinegar. It's the stuff you buy in the gallon jugs. Seal it up, put it in like a cool, dry place. And after two weeks, you'll have a really nice cleaning solution. I'm gonna dilute it. Two parts vinegar solution to about one part water. Get yourself a spray bottle and clean away. It smells a little like vinegar, but mostly like oranges. Good, safe, environmentally friendly cleaner. Avocados, as with any vegetable or fruit, I always look for heavy for their size. I also don't want it to be too squishy. Give it a little squeeze and it's giving back. If that stem pops off, it's getting to the point where it's ripe. If you see an avocado that's not ripe, that stem doesn't pop off very easily. When I cut an avocado, I get my knife, it hits the seed, and I just roll it on the cutting board. You then twist. Take the knife. Don't slam it into the avocado. Just give it a light tap and twist. And this is where I feel people get cut. They start trying to pry it off with their hands. Don't do that. All you're gonna do is pinch it. Push down with your pointer finger and your thumb and it pops right off the knife. If you wanna get all fancy, peel the avocado. Slice it nice and thin. Lay it down. Season that puppy up with a little salt and pepper and you have a nice fancy avocado toast for your besties. Now say you have to make guacamole for a crowd. This is the way I would do it. I got a bowl, cooling rack, and all you gotta do is take your avocado, press through that rack. Don't even have to peel it. Chopped avocado in seconds. Apples are one of the staple fruits in my house. The easiest way, fastest way I find to cut an apple is this. You just cut it in quarters and then just cut the core out. You can go from here and you can slice it or you can go from here and you can dice it as well. If you're going for speed, this is the way to do it. Sometimes when you're working with apples, you cut the apple and it starts to brown. And the way that you can stop it from oxidizing, get a little lemon juice and rub it on there. I really don't use lemon unless I want it there for a flavor. If I'm doing preparations where the apples are gonna get browned, like apple pie filling, I don't worry about oxidation. I'm gonna brown those apples anyway. If I cut this apple for a salad, I'm gonna slice what I need when I need it. I'm not gonna kind of cut it ahead and leave it in lemon juice or water. I wash most of my berries and then I like to store them in the container they came in. Take a paper towel, put it in the bottom. And what this paper towel does is it wicks away any excess moisture. And the berries are gonna last a day or two longer. One thing I don't do though is rinse my raspberries. Raspberries are super delicate. They also have that little hole in there that holds onto moisture. What I do with them, take them out of the package, get a paper towel, and then I transfer my berries delicately into a separate container. The other container tends to hold in the moisture and I want the moisture to get out of these because the wetter they are, the faster they go. And in my house, if it's visually open, it will be eaten. If it's closed away, it never gets eaten. And then we have berry soup in the bottom of the container. Eat them quickly, store them properly, and it'll save you a lot of money. Sometimes your berries are going south. They are not gonna last another day. What I like to do when that happens is make a compote. It gives my berries a little more staying power. A little bit of lemon juice. Lemon juice is just for flavor. Sugar. My heat's at high right now. Once I get the berries breaking down, I'm gonna lower the heat. One thing I do wanna say is if the berries are bad, throw them away. Don't make this compote out of them. I like this on vanilla ice cream. Put it on toast with butter. Cocktails. Using it in cocktails instead of simple syrup. Put them through a fine strainer and just press them through so I get all the juice out. If you like that chunkiness, leave the chunks in there. Chill it down while it's in the bowl. If I'm not gonna use it right away, I'll throw it in the freezer. You can even store it in small Ziploc bags if you want. In front of me, I have three watermelons. All the same, but all very different. You can see these two watermelons have a decent weight to them. They're heavy for their size. I want them to be heavy for their size. These are smaller, but heavier than this one. Next thing I'm looking for is this nice yellow patch. The yellow patch is where it sits on the ground. It usually tells you it's fairly sweet. It's ripe. It's ready to go. The one in the center, I think is probably the most visually appealing, but this is probably the last one I would choose out of the bunch. I'd probably go with this one first, this one second, and this one third. I'm sorry. When I was a kid, watermelons were always these giant affairs, like giant watermelons. You could still get them, but for the most part, the watermelons nowadays are bred to be a little smaller. As with all fruits that are round, I cut off the ends first so I can start with a flat surface. So just kind of jab my knife in there, down and through. When you cover the knife down and through, it's gonna slice nice and even. Cut it in half. I keep my fingers out of the way. Down on one side, go down on the other. Cut down and through, and now we can cut our slices. You get that classic watermelon slice where you can eat down to the rind, and you're good to go. Grapes are one of those fruits that you can just easily sit there and pick them off of the bunch, but when we're doing them in restaurants, chances are you're gonna pick them off the bunch and prepare them. For salads, we like to cut them in half. We get two deli container lids. We're gonna take our grapes, put the other lid upside down, and just kind of go through them and saw through them. And you get these really nice grape halves. Pomegranates are one of the coolest fruits you'll ever see. I used to use these a lot when I worked in a Mediterranean slash Middle Eastern restaurant. So the fast one we're gonna do is this way. I cut it in half. I cut into some of those, but that's okay. I put it cut side down in my hands, and then I get a spoon and I tap. I'm turning it with my pinky and my thumb. You're gonna get most of those seeds out. End of the day, it works, but then I saw this other method. Cut around this part and peel that back. So you can see there's sections, and I'm gonna run my knife down the pomegranate where those sections are, and then peel it back. You pop them out, make sure they go everywhere. No matter what you do with pomegranates, it's gonna make a complete mess. It's not as quick as the other way, but it is definitely the most effective way to get really nice, whole seeds without cutting into them. Good thing about peaches, you have a lot of them at the end of the summer, you can freeze them. Good for pies, good for jams and jellies. So a good peach doesn't have a lot of blemishes, doesn't have a lot of pushed-in marks. You wanna squeeze it, and it has a little give to it, but not mushiness. What I like to do is cut them into slices. I go around the diameter of the peach, peel it in half, and then you can just slice the peach like this. Even though they might stick to the seed, you can peel off around the seed, and then you get some really nice slices for your friends. If you don't wanna hold the peach in your hand, just leave the knife in one place and roll the peach around. Slice around the pit, and you have a lovely sliced peach. Anytime I freeze fruit, I try and flat pack it. If it's just one layer, they're not gonna stick to each other as much, and they'll defrost really quick. I think a lot of people might turn their nose up at frozen fruit, but a lot of times when you're buying commercial frozen fruit, it's picked a little later in its ripeness, and you're getting something that might be a little sweeter, a little juicier. Yes, it's gonna be frozen, so you have to kind of account for that, but you're getting a really good product with frozen fruit. Good for pies, good for jams and jellies. So I have a lot of peaches, and I cannot stand peach fuzz, and I wanna take the skin off. And this is what we do in restaurants called blanching. Just make a little X in the bottom. This just makes it easier to peel later. You have a starting point. Just gonna move these around, loosen the skin. Once the skin starts to peel back, drop it in your ice water. It stops them from cooking. And once it's cool, you can take it out of the water, and the skin peels back nice and easy. I'm just gonna cut it so you can eat it in slices and eat around the rinds. Gonna just quarter it. This center part here tends to be really chewy, so I'm gonna lay it on its side and cut out that really woody part. And with these slices, you can kind of eat around the peel, get it done really fast. Yeah, people have to do a little work when they're eating it, but quick and easy, no fuss, no muss, right? Mangoes scare people. They're little slippery buggers, and sometimes they get away from you. So let me show you a couple of ways that I like to cut mangoes so that they're a little easier to eat. You can see a mango has a flat side and a round side. The seed is in the center of this. So I want to cut off the big meaty sides or the cheeks first. The seed kind of goes straight through here. So I cut off these two ends. I peel around the seed. These are for the pieces of mango that we're gonna use for purees and stuff like that. But I have my four little cheeks. And what I like to do with this is just cut down, make X's, pop it open, and you can eat the mango straight off of the skin. The other way you can do this is by peeling the mango. Gets like really slippery, and you have basically a knife in your hand. The towel helps me from not slipping. Cut off your cheeks. So you get some good, clean mango for slicing and dicing. This is more of a preparation. I'm gonna use it in something or in a recipe. So a lot of the techniques are from what I've learned working in restaurants, but they all make you more efficient, organized, whether it's at home or it's at the job. It just helps you be better at what you do. We gave you a lot of fruit hacks. I know it's a lot, but I'm sure there's some we missed. Put them down in the comments. Tell us what we missed. We love hearing from you guys.