Guacamole Basics

Hola, I'm Daisy Martinez, for eHow.com. Today, we're going to be making guacamole, one of the famous moles of Mexico. The word aguacate or avocado comes from the Mayan word ahuacatl, which means tree testicle. And now that you look at these babies it kind of gives you a visual doesn't it? One of the things that I love to do when I'm making guacamole is I'll make the salsa up to a day before, put it in a plastic container or in a Ziploc baggy in the refrigerator, right before my company comes in, I take out my avocados, mix everything together, perfect, delicious guacamole. Let's go to town on these avocados. When cutting an avocado, you want to just go down the center like so and then spread and what you're going to have is basically two halves. How do you know when an avocado is ready? You want to press down a little bit with your thumb and it just, it should have a little bit of give, not too mushy and now how do we get this pit? It pops right out. Okay, and then we have our spoon. I'm just going to scoop out that aguacate. These by the way are hass avocados, they're smaller, darker, they have that wrinkly texture as opposed to the big alligator pear avocados that you see in Florida or in the Caribbean, those are the ones that I grew up with, Summers in my grandmother's house in Puerto Rico. Okay and you can see, they just scoop right out and these are, I find that the Hass avocados have a more buttery texture, the alligator pears, the big ones have a little more water so I prefer these for my guacamole, okay? Real simple, I'm going to mash the avocado. An avocado really lends itself to flavor so you can, this is your most very basic guacamole but I've seen guacamole with pomegranate seeds, with chickpeas, all kinds of stuff. Okay we have our guacamole. We have some heat because I, you know, I miss my heat so I call this baby heat, this is some jalapeno peppers. Traditional guacamole, I mean I have a Mexican friend who says to me there's no garlic in guacamole, there's no garlic in his guacamole, in my guacamole there's some garlic. And I have a beautiful Mexican white onion chopped fine, let's go ahead and again these are the basics for salsa and I have some chopped tomatoes, seeded with all the goop taken out and then I'm just going to chop some cilantro. Again cilantro, there are herbs that you use in the kitchen that you can't use the stems with. There is a ton of flavor in the stems of cilantro. So let's just go ahead and chop some of that real fine, ooh, the minute you hit cilantro with a knife, it's like that's what green smells like. Okay so we have our stems and our leaves and that goes right in, all of that good stuff and we're going to give it a good mix. Now remember, aguacate drinks salt and you want to offset all that buttery flavor with what, the juice of two limes. And I'm going to repeat this one more time because it bears repeating, make the salsa the night before, the day before, don't be shy and I of course will taste, some fresh ground pepper, one of the best investments you can have in your kitchen, a good pepper mill. And that's it, that's as much trouble as you're going to go to today. We can serve our guacamole in a bowl like this with some beautiful pita chips, plantain chips, twice fried plantains or just some regular corn chips, it's a party on a chip. I'm Daisy Martinez and I'm making guacamole for eHow.com.