The Pomegranate Cutting Hack We’re Still Not Over
It's positively mesmerizing.
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Photo by Mark Weinberg
Whenever I’m in need of help cutting particularly stubborn produce, I turn to my favorite site for food hacks: Twitter.
The social media platform has proven to be quite the resource for radical approaches to prepping fruit. Forget hot takes, looped videos, jokes with thousands of retweets. Twitter, for me, is most valuable when confronted with hard-to-cut fruit.
First it was pineapples. Then it was mangoes. Now, enter the boss-level complicated fruit: pomegranates. Those beautiful, bejeweled, ruby-speckled honeycombs could now be a heck of a lot easier to cut open.
Twitter, it seems, has the method to end all methods. Behold:
The video, of course, makes the whole affair look all too easy. I love that they don’t even take the fruit off the tree.
As far as pomegranate lore goes, there’s a whole bevy of options when it comes to cracking one open. Some suggest peeling off the rosy pebbles while submerged in water. I, myself, have even tested a rather whack-tastic method on this very site.
My roommate, Ali, claims the method in the video is the only way he would ever cut a pomegranate. In Syria, where he’s from, he tells me it’s the go-to and insists that with a thick-skinned and well-ripened pomegranate, it works every time.
I obviously had to try it out for myself.
Well, it works and it doesn’t. I was able to cut a square around the crown and peel back the slices, almost like it was an orange; however, to say it came out as neatly as it does in the video would be a ferocious overstatement. It’s obvious, once you start cutting, that the segments are separated as such. And while running your knife along the fruit’s natural ridges does help to release the beads from the core, it’s not a clean and simple solution.
Perhaps the pomegranate at hand was not perfectly ripe? Or perhaps the skin too thin? Maybe I needed to be more confident, more deft with my knife work?
Either way, my worry faded as soon as I bit into that first tart kernel. However you peel a pomegranate, the arils are always worth it.
A Few Pomegranate Recipes to Try
Burrata and juicy burnt orange make the ultimate creamy-tart combo in this fall-ready salad sprinkled with chopped nuts, fresh mint, and bright little bursts of pomegranate seeds.
We are very passionate about this sticky almond cake, which is soaked in a sweet pomegranate molasses syrup and topped with mascarpone frosting and a generous handful of pomegranate seeds.
For airy pancakes with a hint of tang, add plain yogurt to the batter—we like them best with a pomegranate seeds garnish, but you can swap in just about any fruit you have on hand.
This very versatile recipe is a ramped-up version of recipe developer Phyllis Grant's parents' go-to flank steak treatment. You can serve it over salad, tucked into a sandwich, or on a fork, straight from the fridge (like we said, it's versatile).
These sheet pan meatballs are the definition of low effort, big reward: They cook in under 10 minutes, followed by cauliflower, which caramelizes nicely with help from pomegranate molasses.
Have you tried this method? Let us know how it goes in the comments below.