Pom and circumstance
Monday October 20th 2014, 10:01 pm
Filed under: Food,Garden

As I look through the fall nursery offerings…

A hawk sighting today. A smattering–I like that word, it sounds just like it and it lasted only slightly longer than saying it–of rain.

And a viral video about the way to open a pomegranate.

Actually, we had one waiting to be tackled. Now, I did not know till sampling a grower’s wares at a show last year and looking up the trees later that there are all kinds of pomegranates: there are the sour puckery ones and there’s a variety that is just plain sweet sweet sweet and there’s a range in between. That grower had dark-juiced sweet ones and her products were a revelation. Good stuff.

And the fruit comes in such nice squirrelproof containers! (I may be kidding myself on the sweet ones but the critters do leave whatever my neighbor’s variety is alone.)

So I tried what the video said: you cut off the top jack-o-lantern style and then down the white lines that separate sections of seeds. Pull them down, pluck out the whites, and tadaah!

Lemme tell ya, hon, it ain’t that easy.

But then I wasn’t going to eat mine corn on the cob style anyway. There’s this small issue of my not being able to eat the seeds, just the juice, but I’d read that you just throw them in a blender or cuisinart and then strain away the solids.

Uh…

The timer on the oven was going. The white lines went straight down only halfway and then sideways into randomness. Trying to pry all those little arils out of there, I went past ten minutes with the thing and thwacking the fruit on the counter beforehand hadn’t loosened them away any. I have no way to know how ripe it had been allowed to get or whether that factored in.

Don’t forget the apron I forgot.

Plate, cuisinart, strainer, bowl: half a dishwasher load, while cleaning pomegranate squirts off my sweater and trying to thwack all that grit out of the strainer into the trash.

I got about a third, maybe a half a cup of juice. I said to Richard, (wondering what companion I might plant to go with my Stella) “Pitting cherries is a whole lot less work.”

Dozens of those at a time? A hundred? A tad reluctantly, but, I think we can scratch pomegranate trees off my list. Skylake won’t mind doing the work.


4 Comments so far
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I have come to the conclusion that sometimes it is just easier to buy “processed” fruit, but not often. Pomegranate juice is one of those times, but it winds up being for “special” due to cost.

Comment by Barbara S. 10.21.14 @ 8:28 am

so true — the instructions for such things sometimes make us feel like this is so easy — only not so much!

(this is where my daughter would say “it works when you see it on TV, but not when you get it home”)

Comment by Bev 10.21.14 @ 8:38 am

For what it’s worth, I work over the kitchen sink, with a few inches of water in it, or over a bowl of water. I cut just through the skin of the pom, top to bottom, 4 times (quartering the pom). Pull it apart, and then push each section inside out, which dislodges most of the arils. Yeah, it’s still a little fiddly, to get the smaller bits of membrane, but that’s where the water helps, because the arils will sink and membrane bits float. My husbands aunt made pom jelly every year and just dumped all the arils in a cheesecloth bag, hung it over a bowl , squishing it to pop the arils and let the juice drain to the bowl. No cuisinart to clean!

Comment by DebbieR 10.21.14 @ 3:53 pm

I had amazingly inexpensive glasses of fresh pomegranate juice in Turkey. The sellers used what look like larger citrus squeezers with a long handle – two pomegranates per glass.
I almost bought one of those machines … and I wish I had.

Back at home I use the same bowl of cold water method to pop out the seeds. I add them to granola, yogurt, oatmeal or eat by the spoonful …
I haven’t tried making the juice at home.

Comment by LisaRR 10.28.14 @ 7:37 pm



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