It’s harvest time in much of the northern hemisphere, so homegrown produce such as apples and pears is abundantly available, and often ready to eat straight away. But shops and supermarkets are stacked with fruit from all over the world, all of which may be colourful and appealing, but possibly not ripe at all. To the untrained eye, a ripe melon may be indistinguishable from one that won’t be ready for a week. How do you tell if something is at its best, past its best – or rock hard and sour because it needs more time?
There are some universal clues to look out for, most importantly colour and smell. Generally speaking, ripe fruit is fragrant, and as emphatically the colour it’s supposed to be as possible. Beyond that, there are techniques and strategies for specific crops. Here’s how to gauge the ripeness of everything from avocados and bananas to pears and pumpkins.
Apples
Apples are classed as “climacteric” fruits, meaning that they produce ethylene as part of the ripening process and continue to ripen after picking. “So you harvest a pear, a peach, an apricot, and it will evolve,” says Franco Fubini, founder of the high-end greengrocer Natoora and the author of In Search of the Perfect Peach: Why Flavour Holds the Answer to Fixing Our Food System. “You can’t harvest a carrot and have it evolve.”
How do you tell if an apple is truly ripe? “The practical advice for a consumer would be the colour,” says Fubini. “Apples you find at supermarkets are either going to be on the yellow spectrum or the red spectrum. You want to make sure that they don’t have a lot of green on the skin [unless, obviously, it’s a green variety]. Particularly, you see this at the top and at the bottom of the apple.”
Fubini also recommends giving the apple a light flick with your finger, and listening. “If it sounds like you’re hitting dead wood, then it’s good – it’s crispy,” he says. “If it sounds like a thud, it means it’s a floury apple, and not very good.”
Freshly picked apples may be sitting alongside others that have been stored for months, and often come from far away. Imported apples are mostly ripened artificially after picking. “If you’re [in the UK and] buying fruit from New Zealand or South Africa, they’ll be ripened in the ship,” says Guy Barter, chief horticulturist of the Royal Horticultural Society. “The ship will have a controlled atmosphere store that will have reduced levels of oxygen, and they introduce ethylene to ripen them.”
If you have access to an apple tree, there is an easy way to tell if the fruit is ready to pick. “As soon as they are ripe, apples begin to drop,” says Barter. “So you go round the tree and lift them with your hand. If an apple comes away easily, it’s perfectly ripe. If it needs a very slight tug, it’s almost ripe. If you have to yank it, it’s not ripe and it’s best to leave it.”
Avocados
There is a well-known trick to judging a ripe avocado by flicking the nub off the stem at the top and looking at the colour beneath, which should be an indication of what the inside looks like: green means ripe, yellow means underripe, and brown means it’s going over.
But a surer test is to apply gentle pressure. “It just has to have a very gentle give,” says Sarah Johnson, head of pastry development at Spring in London and the author of Fruitful, a collection of sweet and savoury fruit recipes. “If it’s really firm and it resists, it’s underripe.”
For those of us who may be self‑conscious about squeezing produce in public – and it is, in many cases, the best test of ripeness – Johnson has a suggestion. “When you’re checking for firmness, I always check the bottom of most fruits,” she says. “That way, you’re not bruising the fruit, or browning it when it comes time to cut it open, or damaging it for other customers.”
Bananas
Bananas are, in many ways, the ultimate climacteric fruit – they produce so much ethylene that other fruits ripen rapidly in their presence. Supermarket bananas are always picked green and ripened in transit, and usually sold within a window that allows for further ripening at home. “I try to buy them when they are yellow,” says Johnson. “If they are green, I put them in a breathable brown paper bag in a cupboard where I won’t forget about them, then check on them every couple of days. I find that they ripen really well there.”
Cherries
Look for a deep – but not too deep – colour and a fullness to the overall shape. “You want them to be shiny,” says Fubini. As cherries, like other “non-climacteric” produce such as grapes, strawberries and lemons, won’t ripen after picking, you are also looking for freshness – they can only deteriorate. “Cherry stems should be supple and green,” says Johnson. “That’s a sign of ripeness and freshness. Once the stems begin to shrink and turn brown, or are slightly brittle, then they have been sitting a bit too long and may be a bit overripe.”
Coconut
The surface of a coconut doesn’t offer many clues about the contents. “You can shake it and see how much water is in there, and how much cavity is in there,” says Fubini. “Obviously, it goes from pure water to no water and a lot of flesh.” The less water you detect, the riper the coconut. “But a little bit of water is probably a good sign that it’s not been sitting around for too long.”
Pineapple
There are lots of indicators of ripeness in a pineapple, from a darkening in the colour to the spiky foliage on top. “You’re supposed to be able to pull out the central stalk when it’s ripe,” says chef and food writer Rowley Leigh. “But I just smell it. You smell the base – it’s a strong smell. An unripe pineapple won’t smell of anything.”
Citrus
Lemons you find at the supermarket are usually within acceptable bounds of ripeness, but not always. “Make sure that, one, you don’t see any drying on the skin, which starts at the extremities,” says Fubini. “And certainly that it’s not super hard.”
A really ripe and flavourful lemon will have a lot of citrus oils in the rind. “To release that fragrance, I often gently scratch the surface with a fingernail,” says Johnson. “Just very gently, without piercing it. In the height of citrus season, you almost see those oils rising to the surface. Then you could just lift it to your nose and you should get that spray of citrus.”
Figs
“Figs should be quite jammy in the centre, quite dark and juicy, and not dry at all,” says Johnson. But the state of the inside is not always apparent from the skin. “You can kind of tell when you gently squeeze the fruit; it should be really soft, not firm at all. I would even say sometimes it’s OK if the skin is beginning to tear just a little bit – that’s a sign that the fruit is beginning to soften.”
Mango
“One good thing with fruit that has a high water content, like mangoes, is to be heavy for its size,” says Fubini. “It’s generally good for any product, because it means that it’s quite dense.”
A strong fragrance is another indicator, but can be misleading – a lot of mangoes in supermarkets have been picked well before they were fully ripe in order to survive the transport. But they are not all bad. “So many different varieties come into season at different times of the year,” says Johnson. “So I think it’s good, if you’re a real mango lover, to educate yourself on which mangoes are in season and then seek those out.”
Watermelon
“I was always taught as a kid to give watermelon a gentle knock,” says Johnson. “It should sound a bit hollow.” Like mangoes, watermelons should also have a decent weight-to-volume ratio; a light watermelon is unripe.
Other melons
Again, the best sign of ripeness in any melon is weight. Next, smell is most important.
“They do change colour to some extent, but it’s easier to do it by scent in many cases,” says Barter. “The melon becomes very fragrant when it’s ripe.”
With melons, as with most fruit, you should be smelling the blossom end – opposite the stem end. “Do that at room temperature because that’s when the aromas will be most noticeable to you,” says Johnson.
Kiwi
“You can’t ripen a kiwi,” says Fubini. “You can try, but it’s very tough. They are very thin-skinned. So it’s a tricky one.” With kiwis, the key to ripeness is the amount of give. “Kiwis can go a bit mushy if they have gone over. So if you see them very soft, and if the skin is not ‘popped’ – if it’s starting to wrinkle a bit – it’s gone too far.”
Berries
Strawberries, raspberries, blueberries and currants are non‑climacteric. “They must all be picked at the stage of ripeness,” says Barter. With strawberries, you are mostly looking for good colour. “As much as possible, you want the shoulders to be red,” says Fubini. By this he means the top of the strawberry around its leafy cap.
There comes a time, however, when it’s probably best to accept that strawberry season is over. “Here in the UK, there is strong strawberry production,” says Fubini. “So the strawberries you find in supermarkets in the summer are a lot better than in winter, when strawberries are coming out of Spanish greenhouses.”
Under normal conditions, a decent, fully ripe strawberry will not last long; they go mushy in a few days. Strawberries that do keep well also tend to be hard and tasteless. “The ones grown in Mediterranean countries and in the US have been bred for transportability, so they are rather bullet-like,” says Barter.
Pears
Unlike most fruit, pears are deliberately picked underripe and put through a process known as finishing. “High-quality pears will go through three, four weeks in a cold room,” says Fubini. “It just finishes the ripening process off the tree.”
That said, the pears you buy in supermarkets are often still some way short of ripe. “When choosing a pear, I always tell my chefs to plan accordingly and buy them a few days ahead of time to allow them to ripen at home,” says Johnson. “I ripen them bottom side down on a plate lined with breathable cloth or a kitchen towel.” They are ready when you can slice one easily. “You should never have to force a knife through a pear,” she says.
Grapes
Other than colour, it’s hard to tell without tasting a grape, but if they are on the vine their life can be extended. Barter explains: “You can put the stalk in a bottle of water and the grapes will keep for quite a while, but probably won’t ripen much without sugar from the leaves.”
Lychees
“Like cherries, you want them as full as possible – as plump as possible – and they need to have give,” says Fubini. While you don’t eat the tough skin of a lychee, how it feels can be a good indication of ripeness. “Lychees can dry out very easily. The skin hardens and is not as pliable … it will go from being tightly wrapped around the fruit to there being some space between the fruit and the skin.”
Squashes and pumpkins
“Squashes are nice and easy,” says Barter. “They are ready to harvest when they have developed their full colour, and when they have a hard skin and the neck has gone corky. If you tap them and they ring hollow, that’s a sign a squash or a pumpkin is fully ripe.”
As for the squashes found in supermarkets, you don’t have to worry. “It’s a fruit that can be stored ever so easily,” says Barter. “So it’s really easy for the supermarkets to supply them in perfect ripeness. They ripen and they stay ripe for about three months – or more in some cases.”
Peaches
The question of ripeness in a peach is, to some extent, a matter of taste. Some people like them close to the point of overripeness. Johnson refers to this as a “kitchen sink” peach, “because you need somewhere for the juice to dribble down your chin”.
She prefers a bit of firmness. “Because firmness is also a sign of aliveness,” she says. “An overly ripe peach begins to lose that balance of sweetness and acidity.”
A hard peach will ripen at home at room temperature. To tell if it’s ready, apply a little pressure. “You want to press it towards the bottom of the fruit and it should give,” says Johnson.
Pressing fruit appears to be an inescapable ripeness test, but it need not rise to the level of mishandling.
“I used to work at Chez Panisse [the renowned restaurant in Berkeley, California] and the first thing I learned how to do was identify fruits,” says Johnson. “We had to handle them very carefully, but we would press the same fruits over and over again until they were ripe. And as long as we did it very gently, it didn’t compromise the fruit at all.”
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