You Can Eat This Avocado Whole

It’s been a doozy of a week for avocados. It all began when Pamela Wang, who lives in Hawaii, discovered an avocado the size of her head on a walk to collect her morning paper. Her happenstance discovery could knock out the current Guinness Book of World Records' avocado entry; her fruit weighs just over five pounds.

The Other, Smarter (?) Way to Cut an Avocado

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Then earlier today, British grocers Marks & Spencer, announced the arrival of a product so confounding, astounding, and all types of strange. It’s called a cocktail avocado and it is pit-less. Also, the skin is edible.

The retailers are touting the cocktail avocado as a potential end to avocado hand, the unfortunate affliction that plagued many a home cook—and their hands—over the past year. With the ever increasing popularity of avocado in restaurants and home kitchens, are these seedless versions the safer alternative?

Grown in Spain during December, cocktail avocados may seem like some genetically modified experiment gone array, but they’re actually the result of an unpollinated flower blossom. Usually, restaurants snatch most of the bounty, but Marks & Spencer was keen to get their hands on some of this year’s crop. They plan to sell packages of five for a little over $2.

Visually, the fruit's quite disruptive. Each cocktail avocado measures about two to three inches in length, and look like mousse-y gherkins or soft fleshed cucumbers on the inside. Some recommend cutting open the bottom and squeezing the out innards like a tube of toothpaste, a suggestion that gives me full body shudders. Or simply biting into it whole like, say, a carrot (remember, the skin is edible!) which gives me equal pause. A Marks & Spencer representative recommends deep frying the whole thing. A crispy avocado? Sounds familiar.

Chicharrones-Encrusted Avocado

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Have you ever tried a cocktail avocado? Tell us about it in the comments.