When is a mango is ripe?

The biggest mistake most people make with mangoes is eating them when they are unripe.

That’s because you might not be able to actually tell if a mango is ripe or not.

I want to show you when a mango is ripe, so there will be no doubt in your mind when you want to eat it if it’s going to taste good or not.

Watch the video and then go and make your own mango magic!

How To Tell If A Mango Is Ripe (When Is A Mango Ripe?)

As you can see, I’ve got a variety of mangos in the image above, all of which are at different levels of ripeness.

And I’m going to show you which ones are ripe and which ones you should choose in the stock.

The green ones on the right here are not ripe. And the yellowy-red ones on the left are ripe. Then the two in the middle are on their way to being ripe.

So how do you tell how ripe a mango is?

1. Colour

The first sign is the color!

Now, this doesn’t apply to all mangoes because some mangoes always stay green even when they are ripe. But this first sign does apply to most of the ones that you’ll find in the store.

Generally, stores want to maximize their profit so they won’t put ripe mangoes on the shelves because they’ll go off too quickly and they won’t be able to make any money.

So what they do is they put unripe mangoes on the shelves and we have to ripen them at home.

Hence, when you buy mangoes, generally they will be green or green with a little bit of red on them. And when you ripen them at home you will have to wait until they turn yellowy and ready.

When you want to buy a ripe mango from the store, the best sign of a really nice ripe mango to look for is that its color is redder!

If you can buy a mango that’s all red, then that’s going to be really sweet and juicy and one of the best mangoes you’ve ever tasted.

So if it’s red or yellowy or orangey in the store, that’s the best time to buy it. But if you can only find green mangoes, it’s okay because you can ripen them at home.

When mangoes start to ripen, the green will start to turn a bit yellow.

And then eventually the green will go away completely and you’ll just be left with mainly yellow and a bit of red. It depends on how much red there was to start with.

Some mangoes have more red than others, but generally, the green will turn to yellow.

So that’s the first sign of ripeness – the color.

2. Softness

When is a mango ripe? The second sign that you can tell it’s ripe is by how soft it feels when you pick it up.

When you pick up a green mango in the store and you try to squeeze it with your thumbs or your fingers, it will feel hard like a brick. Like you won’t be able to push down the skin at all.

It would just feel like if you tried to bite it, it would hurt your teeth, that kind of hardness.

Whereas when a mango is ripe, you can actually push it down and it would form a dent there.

You will be able to push it down and you’ll be able to see that the skin does go down and leaves a little indent.

The mango will feel really nice and soft.

It would be really soft and you’d be able to bite through it really easily.

So that’s the second sign – the softness of the mango.

3. Smell

Now the third sign is the smell of the mango.

If you get an unripe mango and smell it around the stem area, you probably won’t be able to smell anything at all. You won’t be able to smell anything sweet or anything that smells like mango.

However, if you smell a ripe mango around the stem, it will smell like you would expect a mango to smell.

You’ll get a sweet aroma coming from it!

And that will tell your senses that it’s time to eat it because the smell is quite important when it comes to fruit, it tells us a lot about the fruit.

4. The Skin Around The Stem

Another sign you can look at to find the ripeness is to look at the stem.

Around the stem, you’ll be able to see that the mango will start to turn color. 

It will start to turn yellow. And when it’s ripe it’ll be entirely yellow.

So this one (in the image above) you can see a little bit of yellow, but there’s still bits of green around the outside. That’s a sign that it’s on its way to being ripe but not quite ripe.

And then when it’s actually fully ripe, it will all be yellow. They’ll be no green anywhere.

That’s the first sign of the stem, to find out when is a mango ripe.

5. Stem Oozes Mango Juice

Another sign of the stem that you can look for is that it starts to ooze out the juice of the mango.

I’m not sure if you can see it in the image above, however, there’s some stickiness around the stem where it leaked some of the juice out of there.

Because it’s really juicy, the juices start to come out of it.

And that’s a sign that the mango is ripe!

6. Shriveled Skin Around The Stem

Lastly, another way you can tell that mango is ripe is when it starts to shrivel.

When you first buy a mango it won’t be a very shrivel-y, it would probably look quite hard and shiny on the top (see image above).

And when it becomes ripe it will go shrivel-y like the one in the image below.

This one is probably a little overripe, but it’s a good image to show you how shrivel-y it is. 

And when the mango becomes overripe it’ll become very shrivel-y because all the juice will start coming out and the mango will start to ferment.

And also you can smell it around the stem too.

If it smells like alcohol or it smells like it’s gone off, that’s a sign that it’s fermenting and it’s too ripe. That’s not a good sign and you might have to throw away the mango.

However, sometimes you can open it up and you might be surprised that it’s still good to eat and you can try a bite.

You can see what it looks like on the inside. If it’s all dark brown on the inside when you open it up with the flesh gone brown, then it’s gone off. It’s fermented and it needs to go into the bin.

But if it’s still nice and yellow and orange when you cut it open, then it’s okay to eat.

So those are the 6 to look for if you want to find out when is a mango ripe.

How To Ripen Mangoes At Home

Now I am going to show you how you can ripen your mangoes at home.

When you buy mangoes in the store, they might be green with bits of red on them. They might have less yellow or orange…

But basically most stores will sell you the mangoes unripe so that they can make as much profit as possible.

Now that’s not a big problem because you can ripen your mangoes at home. So don’t worry too much if you can only find unripe mangoes.

These ones in the image above used to look green and they turned yellow at home.

How Long Would It Take To Ripen Your Mangoes At Home?

It depends on various things, like:

• Where you live in the world.
• The temperature of your house.
• The temperature of the environment that you live in etc.

How Long Will It Take To Ripen?

It can take anywhere between one day and even up to seven or eight days.

At the moment I live in Scotland. And here it is generally a very cold climate. So my mangoes often will take about seven or eight days to ripen.

That can feel really frustrating. You feel like they’re never going to ripen.

But these ones that I buy here always ripen.

Sometimes they don’t ripen. And sometimes you might even leave them for like two weeks and they still haven’t ripened.

Then they’re probably not going to ripen. Because the mangoes were probably picked too unripe.

How Mangoes Are Picked?

Mangoes are picked slightly unripe but not too unripe that they won’t ever ripen.

And then they gas them and the amount of gas they use depends on where you live in the world. 

So it depends on how long it’s going to take to get to you and what the temperatures are going to be like and when will they get to the store.

Therefore they get different levels of gases to different countries depending on where they’re shipping the mangoes to. So it will take a different amount of time for different countries.

Like for example, when I was in Spain, the mangoes there would ripen within one to two days of me buying them.

This was perfect because I was only there for a short time and didn’t want to wait seven days until they ripened because I was coming home within that time.

In Spain, the mangoes were beautiful and also the ones I bought at the market were all bright red like in the image below. They were pretty much ripe when I bought them and they were lovely.

Well, that’s it for today.

I hope that you really enjoyed this blog post and video. If you did, I want to encourage you to like and comment on it.

Secret Slimming Mango And Coconut Green Thickie Recipe

Here is a delicious mango smoothie recipe for you to make with your delicious ripe mangoes.

Please feel free to share this infographic on social media or your website with a link back to this post.

Summary

Here are the 6 signs that will help you find out if your mangoes are ripe:

1. Colour
2. Softness
3. Smell
4. The Skin Around The Stem
5. Stem Oozes Mango Juice
6. Shriveled Skin Around The Stem

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Katherine Kyle @ Green Thickies

Founder at Green Thickies

Katherine lost 56 pounds and recovered from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome with Green Thickies.
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