Avocados are a highly popular nutrition packed food. Eaten in many cultures around the world, avocados can add protein, healthy fats, and essential nutrients to your diet. Although they are higher in calories and saturated fat than most vegetables and fruits, avocados are surprisingly nutritious. Eating one avocado provides you more than half your daily needs for vitamin K and fiber, 33 percent of daily vitamin C, and 40 percent of folate. It also contains 28 percent of your daily need for pantothenic acid, which is a vitamin that helps you to metabolize the foods that you eat.

However, if you are making guacamole or putting avocado on toast, sometimes you don’t end up using all of it! So what are you to do with the remaining amount of leftover avocado?

Well if you have not mashed it up yet, here are some tips on keeping avocado fresh.

1. Use the half without the pit first and leave the pit in the unused portion. By leaving the pit, there may be some browning on the surface of the avocado but it will stay green inside for longer.

2. Just like with apples, coating the cut surface with a little bit of lime juice or lemon juice. This will help to delay the browning and deterioration of the avocado. Although if the half is not eaten within a day or so, this method can lead to a bit of a mushy surface on the avocado.

3. If you don’t have any lemons or limes, you can also coat the cut surface with a small amount of oil and refrigerate. This too also helps to delay the breakdown of the surface of the avocado. However, you want to try to eat this avocado within a day or so before the oil causes an unpleasant flavor.

4. A little plastic wrap can also help. Try to cover the cut surface of the avocado as well as you can to prevent air resulting in oxidation of the avocado.

5. The best method is to keep your half of avocado, with its seed in, in a sealed container with half of an onion. The reason this works so well is that the gasses that are released from onions help to delay the oxidation and browning of the avocado.

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