You've Been Cutting Pomegranates Wrong Your Whole Life
Pomegranates, or Chinese apples, as they are often called, are the superfood of superfoods. Their juice alone contains over 3 times more antioxidants than green tea and provides more than 40 percent of the daily recommended amount of vitamin C (via Medical News Today). But they can also be rather cumbersome to cut up. Pomegranates are sectional fruits (via Food Lion), meaning they're divided into smaller chambers. When you cut off the top of the fruit, you can actually see how the beautiful, fleshy, garnet-red arils are partitioned by pithy walls inside the pomegranate.
As Food & Wine points out, when most people eat a pomegranate, they slice it right down the middle, but this really isn't the most efficient way to get to the treasure inside. In fact, it can be downright messy, leaving the juices from the fruit all over your counters and hands. A bit of a waste if you ask us. If you've been slicing these beautiful fruits down the center, you've been cutting up your pomegranate wrong your whole life. But don't worry. with the help of the internet, we are going to share with you the best way to slice up this fruit.
The trick to cutting up a pomegranate is to use its outer ridges
Justin Chapple of Food & Wine says the first step to cutting up a pomegranate is to start with a sharp knife. The knife needs to be able to pierce through the outer skin of the fruit. You are going to start by cutting off the knobby stem, enough so you can actually see the different compartments containing the seeds. Next, you are going to take your knife and make incisions along the longitudinal ridges that run down the sides of the pomegranate, going from top to bottom and cutting through the skin but not through the fruit. Chapple recommends cutting in about a quarter of an inch.
Finally, you are going to take the palms of your hands to separate the sections, revealing all of the ready-to-eat clusters of fruit. This process seems pretty efficient with minimal loss of fruit or juice. But Food Lion says that an even easier – but not necessarily the best – method is to cut off both the top and bottom of the pomegranate so you can more readily see the sections where you need to cut. However, the company cautions that this way can be a bit messier.