Dice an Avocado

Series Summary

Cooking is all about variety. With so many foods and flavors out there, the possible combinations for any dish are literally infinite. And since your palate is designed to accommodate as many subtleties of texture and taste as you can prepare, being creative is the key.

Lately, have you been going to cook a meal and just felt like you were out of ideas? Maybe you’d like to have some julienne chopped vegetables or some tasty seasonings, but you don’t know how to prepare a bell pepper or roast garlic. In this free easy cooking tips video series, learn some basic culinary techniques that will help you continue to be creative in the kitchen. Our expert chef will show you some important cutting and dicing practices that make short work of fruits and vegetables, while leaving your fingers intact. Also get tips on how to make clarified butter, prepare a roux, properly sharpen your kitchen knives, and calibrate your cooking thermometer. Bon appetit.

Video Transcript

" Hi! I’m Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and today I’m going to show you a simple and efficient way to dice an avocado. You have to just be careful, make sure that you got a really sharp knife obviously and I’m right handed so I’m going to hold the avocado in my left hand and I’m actually just going to make a cut down the center and as we all know the avocado’s got a seed in the middle so once you hit the seed don’t put any undue pressure that’s not needed on the knife there and I’m just going to circle around the seed just like that. So I’m going to separate this way and there’s always going to be one half that has the seed and one that doesn’t, so I usually just pop the knife in there and twist and the seed sticks to the knife and we’ll pop that off and now we’re seedless. Okay holding the avocado in the left hand still and the knife in the right I’m going to make parallel cut slices and just kind of follow the skin and use the skin as a guide, so obviously you want to be really careful not putting undue pressure on the knife or you’ll go all the way through the skin into your hand okay. So then we go this direction now…okay so now you can already see we have dices so I made parallel lines going this way and parallel lines going this way as you notice I really just used the tip of the knife of that and just follow the skin. So we got a spoon here I’m going to go ahead and separate the skin from the avocado itself and pop this out and now we have some diced avocado there and it’s a lot gentler way to remove cause you want to keep the avocado looking nice and you don’t want to bruise it through the cutting of it and you can separate those however you want and it makes a nice presentation that way, otherwise you’ll just scoop out the avocado without making the dice cuts on it for guacamole and such and you can just separate the skin from the avocado this way and there’s your half of avocado and then you can cook with it as you wish. So that’s a simple way just to dice an avocado and clean one at the same time."