Prevent "Avocado Hand" With This Hack For Opening an Avocado Without a Knife

Have you ever cut your hand while trying to cut open an avocado? If so, you aren’t alone. According to OSF Healthcare, every year, about 9,000 people end up in the hospital due to “avocado hand” injuries.

That’s probably why people on TikTok are going crazy over a video of a Mayan chef’s hack on how to open an avocado without a knife. Here are the details on this viral video and how you can try this avocado-opening trick at home.

Travel blogger Gerry Isabelle was in a Mayan cooking class in Guatemala when she learned the technique for opening an avocado without a knife. Isabelle’s Dec. 4, 2023, TikTok video of Mayan chef Anita demonstrating the avocado trick has received over 1.4 million likes and thousands of comments, as of this writing.

Isabelle also posted videos on Anita’s method for cutting an onion without crying and about Anita’s inspiring story of success. Commenters to the viral avocado video were just as impressed with Anita as they were with her skills at knife-less avocado opening.

“This singlehandedly changed my life forever,” said one commenter. “A decade in the food industry, and I know nothing,” said another. “My dad is from Guatemala and this is in fact how he opens avocados,” commented someone else.

So how does it work?

Anita’s method for opening an avocado without a knife, as seen in Isabelle’s TikTok video, looks pretty easy. With the avocado cradled in between the heels of her hands, she gently presses the sides of the avocado together until it cracks open at the top.

“When it’s cracked, you just move your hands to the same direction in the middle, press in the bottom, and open your avocado,” Anita said in the video. Isabelle and other people in the class can be heard oohing and aahing as the avocado splits in half almost effortlessly.

This skill will probably take some practice — looks like there's a lot of guacamole in your future.

There are other hacks to opening avocados without a knife. YouTuber Genius Asian demonstrates how he opens an avocado without any tools by pinching the avocado skin until the green flesh shows. He tears the avocado in half vertically rather than horizontally.

If you’re making avocado toast or using the avocado as a spread on your sandwich, you can just pinch off the top stem part of the avocado and squeeze the green flesh onto your toast, as demonstrated in a viral TikTok hack from @red.vino.