Fast Way to Process a Pomegranate

Hey Dirt Farmer Jay here. If you're like me you love pomegranates but you really hate the hassle of processing them. Stick with me and I'll show you a quick technique to get from this to this in just a few moments. Hey Dirt Farmer Jay here. You know we love having pomegranates and we try to have them in our refrigerator for as much of the season as we can. In the United States these are in season oh for about the last third of the year, quarter of the year, a little bit in the first of the year and so when they're available we take full advantage. These are fantastic for all sorts of just fresh eating, juicing, having them on a salad and so forth. If you're watching this I don't need to convince you how great these are. But the problem is is trying to process one of these and get it to a fresh bowl of eating very quickly. Before I get into showing you exactly how to cut this I want to give a couple principles of pomegranates because if you can remember this and I'm sure you can you'll never be mystified again when it comes time to cut one of these up. If you look at a pomegranate you can see at the end here that this used to be a bloom at one time so that means that it hung on the tree like that and this was the stem end. You can see it pulled away a little bit here when it was harvested but it hung on the tree like this. For us to process it we're going to cut around right around on the shoulder of this just through the skin and peel that cap off. Now one other thing when you look at the shape of a pomegranate you can see that it's got some kind of flat areas and these ridges here give away the hint that this is where the sets of pomegranate seeds actually known as arils, the seeds are actually inside of them, are deposited. The outside of the pomegranate is covered with what's called an exocarp and what's inside that all the arils are embedded in that nourish them and protect them is called an endocarp. If you cut this the wrong direction you're gonna end up with something that's very unpredictable, lots of waste, loss of juice, but if we cut this along the edges here after decapping it then you'll end up with a great way to process it quickly. Well let's jump in let me show you what you're going to need right here. Obviously you need some pomegranates but you're going to need a couple bowls here. This bowl simply is to take the cut off pieces and this is my little composting bowl and if there's some damaged fruit and all that I give to the chickens. You may just do it where you put it directly in your compost bucket if you have a kitchen compost bucket. You're going to need a little knife like this now it doesn't need to have a hook bill on it like this I just happen to like this but a short little knife it's pretty sharp you'll see why in just a moment and kind of stubby. Next thing you're going to need a wooden spoon and we'll show you that there's a little bit of a heavier one but we'll show you the roll of this in a few minutes. I always like to have a washcloth around because you're going to get some of the juice splatter out of the arils. One other tool that I've got here dark clothing believe me I've had this juice show up on a couple things and if you don't get it right away you can stain the clothes permanently so wear something dark you'll be happier and so will the other people in your family if you catch my drift. All right let's go ahead and get started. There's your bloom end as we said it's been hanging on a tree like that but that's the side we're going to process. Take your knife hold it about perpendicular to the corner of where it drops over and simply penetrate the exocarp and start rotating around. The goal is to return back to where you started and I did. Now put this over a deeper bowl as you can see this bowl is deep enough to allow me to get this down in below the rim so that I don't end up with a lot of splatter even so you may end up with some escaping. Notice this comes off very easy and when I pull it look at that isn't that beautiful? Now every time you do this it may look slightly different but the principle is the same you're simply trying to take that cap off and at that point it becomes very clear. Notice I told you about the ridges notice that those connectors correspond with where it's protruding the furthest out and it's very clear on here that we have one two three four five cells. Here's your next step you're simply going to take your knife and score but only go down about that far do not go all the way down to the bottom. Now you just simply score move to your next one score right in line with each one of those turn and when you've got those scores turn this upside down and start spreading them apart. As you do you're going to see some of the arrows begin to fall and let's just take a look and see what we've got here. Notice that everything is very clean where it needs to be including that center area and you can simply pop these out like this. Now it's up to you of how much time you want to take peeling out some of these membranes. There's a way you can get rid of them after the fact but here's the quick way and way people that eat these on a regular basis. I've peeled probably 50 to 75 of these now but I've seen videos of street vendors in Asia that just go super fast and this is the process they use and when they get to this point they simply turn over take the wood spoon and they hit it right in line with each and just rotate. Notice that if I had cut really deep it would probably cut it all the way down here and that part would fall out. We're trying to let it stay connected. We'll just rotate you can see a little bit of the splatter happening and we just had an escapee there. Now let's see how clean it got. I never get them a hundred percent but notice how much of that did come out of there and you can spend some time picking these out if you want to. For the purpose of this video I'm not going to do that but you can see that the vast majority of the work is done. That's pretty cool huh? Now one more thing here. Notice that some of what's called the endocarp came along with this here. Now you can either do what I'm doing right here and pick it out by hand or it's up to you. You can simply pour in some water. This is an optional step. You don't need to do this if you don't want to. You simply pour in water and by so doing I kind of clean up the bowl at the same time and afterwards after I clean this off I'll pour this off into a house plant someplace. Don't waste the water with the juices in it and notice what's happening as soon as we do that. All of the membranes float to the top. They are lighter than water. The arils, the seeds, everything that you see down below drop to the bottom. Now you can simply skim these off, throw them in your compost bowl and pretty much clean these up very quickly. We'll stir them again one more time just to break up anything that's loose. All that comes up to the surface you can skim it off very quickly. When you're at this stage now you can take your slotted or perforated spoon simply tap it out and put that right in your bowl. Fresh eating! Incredible! Hope you liked the video. If you did please like it, pass it on to someone else. If you have an insight or technique on this you'd like to share with us please send it to us and we'd like to comment out with you and share it with others if we can. Until the next time this is Dirt Farmer Jay.