It is happening again – we’re about to be bombarded by the Shepard avocado season. A touch later this year than last yea thanks to a glut of the delicious king Hass avos. But make no mistake; the cursed, rubbery bastards are filtering into the fresh produce section of your local shops and this year there’s a metric fuck-tonne of them coming.
It’s the changing of the guard if you will. The perfect, colour-changing, delicious Hass avocados we love to mush over toast, craft into guacamole, and slice into salads have just about gone from supermarket fresh produce sections, and the less-good Shepard avos are here once again.
Wake me up when the Shepard avocados fuck off
— kc (@sendboots) March 19, 2022
This is the worst time of the year, my friends.
Some might call me a “simpleton” or a “bad journalist” for this take but I stand by it: Shepard avocados can straight up kiss my ass. Those slim, shiny green bastards can pucker up right through until May when their season ends and we’re reunited with the supreme Hass. Hell, I’ll even take a Reed over a Shep.
That’s a month and a half of dealing with shithouse avocados. A month and a half of avoiding avo toast at the café. Of cursing out the avocado section at the shops.
So where do I even begin with these terrible excuses for avocado? How about the outside. The skin.
Shepard avocados have shiny, glossy green skin that just makes them look fake. They’re a lot smoother than their (heaps better) relatives, the Hass/Reed/Delcado avos. Shepard skin doesn’t even turn a darker shade when its ripe so you don’t even know until you pick it up for a squeeze or cut into it. What’s the point of that?
Once we get over the trickery of the exterior, which exists to dupe us into thinking that they’re either glossy wax fake avocados or extremely unripe, we cut through into the (hopefully soft) interior.
Ok, one more thing on the skin before I touch on the green-and-yellow flesh here. The skin is thin. Too thin! You try and scrape the avo out with a fork/spoon/knife and nine times out of ten you end up scooping through the skin and onto your hand. It’s so dumb!
The skin needs to stay strong and supportive to act as a wee little cup for in-skin avo mashing or behave as a barrier between my hand and the knife. None of this flimsy nonsense, please. Another score for the beloved Hass.
???? WHY
Ok so the Shepard avocado flesh itself. What we love, crave and yearn for is a creamy, pastel lime green malleable fruit that can easily be smooshed, sliced and served cleanly. Flesh that’s workable and able to be made into chunky or smooth guacamole. That’s what I’m after.
With the Shepards, you’re stuck with a rubbery texture that has to be in the most perfect five-second window for it to actually mash without just turning into tinier and tinier cubes. Fuck to that. Fuck to the bad avocados.
And they’re this weird yellowy-green colour, almost too vibrant to look real and/or edible. What’s going on there? They look like some kind of bright yellow baby food when you finally get the hang of smushing them right, and they taste like nothing. Nada! Zilch! Zero creamy delicious flavour.
You’ve spent all that time and effort to wind up with a weird-textured, no-flavoured pile of crud.
Yeah sure, you might pose the argument that Shepard avocados don’t go brown when they’ve been cut. But just bung some lemon juice and a beeswax wrap over a sliced-open Hass and you’re ship-shape, my dude. I don’t trust an avocado that doesn’t oxidise as soon as you look at it.
In no way does a Shep stand up to a Hass in any regard. Get off my toast. The end.
Now, let us decompress with the best avocado-adjacent video known to mankind:
