By stealth, the avocado is slowly eroding the joys of eating. First we had avocado ice cream, then avocado mousse, then the (unholy) smoothie. The latest – courtesy of Instagram – is the avocado “bun”, in which an avocado stands in for a burger bun. It was started by Colette Dike, a food stylist based in the Netherlands, who posted a picture of an avocado halved, in which was sandwiched a chickpea burger and some grilled baby sweetcorn.
More recently, she has assembled a classic cheeseburger in an avocado bun, and at the weekend she posted one with whipped feta, bacon and a fried egg. A look through her admittedly beautiful feed reveals an obsession with the fruit – in one picture, she has stuffed it with chocolate paste and rolled the outside in granola. We’ll leave that for another day. Today, we take on the avocado bun. Could it possibly catch on?
The first problem is that cutting an avocado in half crossways just feels wrong. It’s also surprisingly hard to get the stone out. And then what do you do with the hollows? I filled mine with mayonnaise, which in nauseated hindsight was a bad idea. Definitely don’t go for her fish-finger sandwich: you can only fit an unsatisfactory two fingers in to an avocado bun, though a slice of tomato and an onion ring fit pleasingly. Cram some lettuce in, and sprinkle with sesame seeds and irony.
Eating it like a burger is obviously impossible. You have to cup your hands around it as if you’re holding a baby bird, and gently suck at it until you can get enough purchase to take a bite. Then it disintegrates into a fatty, creamy mess.
The website Mashable called the avocado bun the summer’s “most polarising fad”; Dike told the site that people might prefer to use a knife and fork and think of it as a stacked salad. Which is, I think, the opposite of a burger. One for the cameras only, then.
