How An Apple Can Help Soften Unripe Fruit Fast

They say an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but there's another reason to keep apples on hand. They are the special ingredient that can help ripen the rest of your fruit faster when you're in a rush to eat it. This only works with fruits that ripen off the vine, so we're sorry, but you can't use the apple trick to ripen grapes, citrus fruits, berries, or watermelon. Once those are picked, they don't get any sweeter.

It's best to choose the absolute best apples and other fruits when you're at the grocery store, but sometimes, they just don't have any that are ripe and ready to eat. So if you're dying to eat your unripe apples, bananas, avocados, peaches, plums, pears, mangos, or tomatoes and you don't want to wait a second longer than you have to, throw them in a paper bag with an apple (or even a few apples) and seal it up. Let the fruit sit for a few days at the most, and it will be ripe and ready.

It seems like magic, but it's science! These fruits give off small amounts of ethylene gas, which helps with the ripening process. Some fruits, like apples and bananas, give off more of the gas, so when you add them to a bag of unripe fruit, they'll help speed the ripening process along just by emitting ethylene and having it trapped with the fruit inside the bag.

Placing fruit in a paper bag with an apple (or banana) isn't the only way to speed up the ripening process. There are a couple more fruit-ripening hacks that are worth sharing.

If you're all out of paper bags, try covering your fruit in uncooked rice. The rice traps the gas near the fruit and works in the same way that the apple in the paper bag does, with the result being faster-ripening fruit. This is a popular method for mangoes, but it will work for any fruits that ripen off the vine, even apples.

Other, less popular, ways to speed up ripening often involve heat. For example, placing bananas in the oven or air fryer can help speed up their ripening. Likewise, putting an avocado in the microwave will make it much softer and easier to work with. A slower way to add heat and help ripen fruits is to place them on top of the refrigerator, as the little bit of heat emitted from the kitchen appliance will give fruits a ripening boost.

Of course, you could just ditch the paper bag and place all your fruits together out in the open. Just having them close together will help them ripen. It stands to reason that if you want to slow down ripening so some of your fruit lasts longer, just don't store it together or put it in the refrigerator, as the cold temperature slows down the ripening process drastically, so you can take it out and let it do its thing when you're ready to eat it.