Honestly this might be the shortest post I ever do. Every year I show friends how I clean a pomegranate and not make a huge mess and they say, 'you should do a post about that' but it always escapes me so it's never happened. I recall when my daughter Lauren was younger and in high school, she helped a woman she babysat for get ready for a holiday party each year by cleaning a bunch of pomegranates. She would come home afterwards with purple hands and a complaint about how much she hated doing it. I only wish I had known then to show her The Best Way to Seed a Pomegranate!
I know there are myriad methods I've seen online including spanking the poor fruit with a big wooden spoon or drowning it in water but I was lucky enough to meet someone years ago who had pomegranates growing in their yard and their method has turned out to be the most natural one and for me the best too; there is almost no mess at all!
The truth is that the mess is the juice we all crave and that juice happens whenever the arils inside are punctured with a knife. So it behooves us to puncture as few as possible. And the trick to that is to follow natures path and not make our own.
First, cut off the top of the pomegranate where the fruit has fallen off the tree, it should have a sort of crown on the top side. Once you cut off a minimal amount, you will see the separations in the fruit made by membrane.
Using those separations as your guide, cut as close as you can down through two of those adjoining membranes, separating one piece of the pomegranate from the fruit. These are the only cuts you'll make, so you will see some juice as the juice is what is released from the arils when they are cut by a knife.
Use your hands to rub the seeds into a container. Now that you have opened the fruit, you should be able to pull successive sections apart with your hands and repeat; taking off pieces of the membrane on each piece and releasing the fruit inside.
That's pretty much it; just a couple of minutes and no big mess and more perfectly formed seeds that haven't been sliced to pieces. I use them in cocktails, salads, as an ice cream topping and sometimes I just eat them with a spoon. They are quite simply the ruby jewels of the fruit world and so much easier to deal with then you might have ever imagined. Enjoy!
