This Secret Hack Lets You Get WAY More Avocado Bang For Your Buck

There's little worse than the letdown of cutting into an avocado only to find that pit takes up almost all of the inside, leaving hardly any of the precious flesh. This is why, when I first heard about the trick to buying avocados with smaller pits and thus more edible fruit, I could hardly contain my excitement. Was it too good to be true?

Instagram phenom Bethany Ugarte, better known to her 325K followers as @lilsipper, first brought the hack to my attention. "Pear-shaped and bumpy skin contain smaller seeds (aka: more avocado)," she wrote. "Round shaped and smooth skin contain larger seeds (aka: less avocado)," she wrote.

Her method has been backed up by various internet anecdotes, which intrigued me enough to put it to the test myself. I bought 10 avocados at my local grocery store, five of which were pointier and thinner and five of which were rounder and plumper. Interestingly, intuitively, I found myself drawn to the plumper avocados—exactly the ones that were likely, according to the hack, to have less flesh.

I scooped out the insides and measured them, and the pointier avocados yielded about 10¼ cups of fruit. As for those more appealing rounder avocados? They yielded 6¾ cups of fruit—a whopping 4¼-cup difference. Considering the price of avocados ($2 each for a nonorganic variety at my local grocery store!), this amounted to quite a bit of wasted cash over the years.

We tested this with Hass avocados, the most commonly sold in U.S. grocery stores, although the actual type of avocado can affect the seed size as well. Reed avocados can have a larger seed than Hass, for instance, while Pinkerton avocados have the smallest seeds of all. If you're an avocado enthusiast, it's worth seeking out different types since they have different flavors and textures in addition to different seed sizes.