Most people are familiar with the Haas avocado. Lori and I try a Bacon avocado — that’s the name of the variety, there’s no pork products in it (darn) — to see if it would be good for guacamole.
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Can’t view the video
Says it’s set to private by invitation only.
No bacon avocado for me!
I can pick Haas avocados and know when they’re ripe and when they’re over ripe.
The Bacon ones (who knew that was their name?)? Not so much.
I can’t see the video. It says that I need to accept a friend request before I can view it.
cannot view video as well. too time consuming to open email and not be able to read/view. please fix this or remove me. thanks.
Whoops, sorry about that. I forgot to update the settings once it was uploaded. It should be there now.
I grew up with these aguacates in the Caribbean – Dominican Republic, to be exact.
LOVE them – slice them up, sprinkle with salt and pepper – YUM!
In the video, they didn’t look quite ripe when being spooned out – should have been able to just quarter them and peel the skin right off, and should have been just as soft as a just-ripe Haas (they won’t get mushy like an over-ripe Haas). Test for ripeness just like a regular pear: a give to gentle pressure at the stem end.
One of our favorite salads: slice/cut up equal sized amounts of banana and avocado, squeeze on the juice of a key lime/lemon (to taste), sprinkle with sugar (to taste), pinch of salt. Stir it all together and allow to macerate in fridge for a bit – if you have enough lemon juice/sugar you should have a viscous type dressing (like a mayo based dressing) with a sweet/tart flavor that perfectly complements the fruit. LOVE it!
Thanks for the info on how to detect ripeness on the other avocados. Sometimes those are all I can find and I ALWAYS end up with them being way too hard to do anything with!
Thanks, Cheryl. None of the people I showed them to recognized them. Everyone thought Haas avocados were the only kind.
The Haas were definitely on the edge of over-ripe. The Bacon were fairly soft — though not as much as the Haas — but the real problem with peeling was the skin was so thin.
There are, like, 37 varieties of avocado. These are just 2.
Yes, and these are the only two I’ve ever seen in the grocery store. In fact, this was the first time I ever saw more than just the Haas.
I’m a new reader…stumbled on your blog googling tallow and suet and so glad I found it. We had a ‘bacon’ avocado tree in our backyard growing up, never knew the name, for us it was just avocado as I didn’t know there were any other types at the time. I have a hard time eating the Haas variety b/c I love the other ones so much. It definitely wasn’t ripe enough in the video, it should be nice and soft and usually much easier to peel the skin off then a Haas.
Wish I could find them here…*sigh*!
those “bacon avacados” look like the kind of “green” avacados they have in Uganda, the only kind they had when I was there, looked like mutant green avacadoes…probably a little yellower than a normal mexican avacado inside, they should have a similar softness when ripe. One interesting tidbit is that in the Ugandan markets the avacados and mangoes are easy to mistake for each other because they have a similar size and smooth greenish skin.
Some avocado tips from a hobbyist…
Visit the California Avocado Commission Understandably, they pitch only the main California varieties, but there are many more.
There are over 500 avocado varieties but only about three dozen varieties are grown worldwide commercially, with hobbyists growing a few dozen more. Living life with only one variety of avocado (Hass) is like living with only one variety of apple or tomato. Like any fruit they have different seasons, textures and flavors.
Choose different varieties depending on use, like whether you like a light salad or want more buttery guacamole. If your grocery stocks only one type of avocado, either educate them or choose a more cosmopolitan grocery. Don’t settle.
Also, not everything sold as a “Hass” is the original Hass. Many are sub-varieties, like the reddish Hass grown in Chile for summer availability in the US that has a slightly different taste. Commercial growers are into the new Lamb variety of Hass, but that has a lot to do with growing characteristics and market presentation of a reliably standard shaped fruit. It is a great tasting avocado, though.
I have both Hass and Bacon trees in my yard in the SF Bay area. The Bacon has very good flavor but is more of a fresh-eating, sliced-for-salad avocado. Works great on hamburgers and in sandwiches, too. I planted it because it is a truly beautiful tree with dense green foliage and upright, columnar growth habit and it is one of the most cold-tolerant avocados, so it endures the occasional overnight frost well. It also bears earlier with a wider season than the Hass.
Hass has that great buttery, high-fat flavor but that can be overwhelming in a salad or on a hamburger. Hass trees don’t do so well in northern cal, and tend to have a sparse, open growth habit, but once you get the tree established it will do OK.
I also have a couple of Mexicola trees, which are the most cold tolerant, and once established will survive overnight frosts into the 20′s. These produce mini-avocados, about the size of an egg, which are smooth-skinned black like little oval eggplants and taste pretty much like a Hass. These are fun if your grocer ever gets them in.
One last thing: avocados do not grow true from seed. You have to propagate from cuttings if you want the same variety. All those folks who sprout a Hass seed will end up with an avocado tree, but it won’t be a Hass. Like apples, avocados will be radically different from seed with a very wide variety of possible tree types, fruit or no fruit, edible or not edible and so on.
Thanks for the details. Most of that I saw when researching this, but hadn’t heard they were also heterozygous.
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