Many buyers when choosing exotic fruits, can not decide: avocado - fruit or vegetable. Some call this fruit fruit, others call it a vegetable. Someone thinks the avocado is a berry or even a nut.
Avocado is a fruit, a nut, a vegetable or a berry?
The mysterious avocado really brought confusion to people's minds and divided them into different groups according to perception. Perhaps to clarify the situation you need to turn to biology. Following the scientific interpretation, the avocado is properly called a fruit, since the fruits grow on trees. In addition, the fruit of the avocado has a hard bone in the core, like most garden crops.
But the composition of the fruit is more like a vegetable. In the flesh of the fruit there is a large concentration of substances and sugars, which are not peculiar to fruit. According to Ozhegov, any juicy fruit, regardless of their form and sugar content, should be referred to fruits. So, avocado is, after all, a fruit. But with one caveat.
The taste of avocado can be compared with the taste of an immature pumpkin or pear. The more the fruit pulp is ripe, the more the taste and consistency of the fruit changes. The flesh of the ripe avocado fruit is even compared with the taste of butter. And the aftertaste is even stronger. Some even compare it with nuts and greens.
Some fans of overseas fruit can not call avocado fruit because of the taste of the fetus. Well, no it does not look like fruit taste. All the same, fruits belong to the same class of plants. But, perhaps, this is the distinctive feature of the avocado, its advantage. Mid-ripened avocado fruits are distinguished by neutral taste. This makes it possible to combine fruit with any other food.
In this case, it is treated as a vegetable for a garnish. It is added to various dishes, put in a salad, which is seasoned with sour or salted sauce. Basically, here we are talking about the second course. Very few recipes with avocados for desserts. But full of recipes with avocado for salads, various snacks, pates, sandwiches, minced meat.
It so happened that lime and lemon became the constant companions of this fruit. Citrus fruits help preserve the taste and color of the dish with the avocado, not allowing it to oxidize in the air.
Given all these nuances, it becomes obvious that nature has endowed the avocado with a wide variety of properties. Fruits grow on trees, moreover, on evergreen plants. The flesh of the fruit in composition, taste and properties is more like a vegetable. The juiciness of the fetus depends on the conditions of the growth of the avocado. This is a very photophilous and hygrophilous plant.
Today, avocados are mainly grown on an industrial scale. Moreover, in agricultural terminology, one can often find a description of an avocado, like berries, which has a round or oval shape and a hard greenish-chestnut peel. If you cut off the top layer of the fruit, it gets a darker shade. And if it's still a berry, it has very unusual dimensions (12-25 cm in length and weighing up to 1.8 kg).
And if you consider that the fruit has an oily texture and produces a slight nutty flavor, it is more likely
But still, most people are used to calling avocado fruit. By analogy with any fruit growing in the middle latitudes. The peculiarity of this plant is that only the fruit of a tree with a juicy pulp is used for food. But only without pits. They can cause intoxication. In the native land of the plant - in Mexico or in Central America - these properties of the fetus are very well known.