Up until a week ago or so, I cringed at having to deseed a pomegranate. Anybody who has ever tasted the delicious fruit knows what I am talking about and those who don’t should go to their local grocery store and get one. Now to spare you (and those who eat the fruit regularly) the pain, mess and labor of deseeding a pomegranate the traditional way I am going to share with you my newly discovered deseeding technique.
Usually, I would have put my pomegranate on a large place, prepared half a roll of paper towels and cut the bugger in half and just started poking at the seeds with whatever means available (read: own fingers). You don’t want to do that! Why? It’s extremely messy and everything that touches the red juice, and trust me it will go everywhere, will turn a gorgeous red colour.
So here is what you do:
1. Get a big bowl and fill it up with luke warm water.
2. Cut off the top and bottom of the pomegranate. Same way you do for peeling a pineapple. Just the tough skin, do not cut in too deep. You end up with a flat surface on the top and on the bottom.
3. Score the skin from top to bottom in 4 places as if though cutting it in quarters but not going all the way through, just cutting through the skin.
4. Immerse the entire pomegranate in the water and gently break it apart into 4 quarters. You’re using the scoring to do so by gently pushing the parts away from each other.
5. Once you have the pomegranate quartered you can take three quarters away on a plate and work on one at a time.
6. Now all you do, you do underwater separating this way the messy membrane from the seeds. Membrane will float in the water and the seeds being heavier will sink to the bottom. You can then fish out the membrane with a small strainer and voilĂ you end up with nicely separated seeds with no goopy white stuff. Now, do not strain the whole thing through a big strainer! It seems like a no-brainer, but you are going to be tempted to do it to get rid of the water. I simply fished out my seeds with my hands gently rinsing them with water before placing them in a container.
I assure you that this method is the cleanest and fastest one there is. The first time I tried it I kept reaching for the next quarter when there was none left! And you will not get anything red from the juice either!
I have seen another method of deseeding a pomegranate floating on the internet where you cut it in half and then pound it with a rolling pin until the seeds fall out. Somehow, I don’t even want to try this method, mostly because it sounds even more messy than my old method.
As for the chili peppers, my first and last encounter with them yesterday was a very painful one. I was making my mushroom soup and wanted it to have a kick, as per usual. So I had these red chili peppers kicking around in the fridge and thought I’d use them instead of the powder stuff and from then on my day went downhill. I picked the smallest there was in the package and cut it in half lengthwise. Then I scraped the seeds out with my fingers and rinsed the thing with water. As I was doing it I could already smell the spicy aroma, but somehow I wanted to make sure it was coming from the red thing and I put it closer to my nose to smell it. The odour was so strong that I jerked my head back as if punched by a professional boxer. So at that point I decided to only put a fraction of the pepper in my soup. I proceeded to cut off a tiny bit of the pepper, I chopped it up and put in my soup. At that point my nose was so full of the spicy aroma that I only had enough time to reach out for a tissue and blow it. There was no time for reflection. So I took care of my nose, wiping it thoroughly, using the same fingers that just scraped the seeds out of a red hot chili pepper! For the next 45 minutes of so I thought my nose was going to fall off! It was officially on fire and the only relief could come in a form of a wet face cloth stuck to my face. It was truly an awful experience. But I guess my loved one must be happy, because there is no way I’m ever experimenting with chili peppers again!
