Kitchen Questions: How to peel a pomegranate

Q. It’s pomegranate season, but picking out the seeds is so tedious. Is there an easy way to get them out?

A. Yes, indeed. Just score through the leathery skin with a sharp knife, going around the equator of the fruit halfway between the flowering end and the end where it attached to the shrub.

Pull it apart into two hemispheres. Stretch these by pulling the skin outward from all sides.

Over a basin, turn one hemisphere seed-side down in your hand and whack it hard with a wooden spoon or paddle, all over the skin, so the seeds fall out through your fingers into a basin.

Pick out the bitter white pieces, and there are your seeds.

Even easier, fill a basin with water. The seeds will fall to the bottom, but the white material will float. Pour off the water through a sieve, and there are your seeds.

To juice, crush them with a potato masher. Whizzing them in a blender will shatter the seeds and release bitter compounds into the juice. Be careful. The juice can stain.

Be aware that pomegranates don’t ripen further after they’re picked, so process them soon after you buy them.

The pomegranate plant itself is a woody shrub or small tree, with medium green leaves that strike a beautiful color harmony with its red-orange flowers.

The fruit is actually a leathery berry, with many arils inside, as the hard seeds are called. The arils are packed into chambers formed from tannic, fleshy white pith called albedo.

At the blossom end of this fruit is a puckered flange of tissue where the flower’s pistils emerged, and this is its calyx.

Some cooks sprinkle the arils on salads or pastries, but the sweet-tart and slightly astringent juice is what you want. It contains more antioxidants - anthocyanins, tannins and phenolics like ellagic acid - than almost any other fruit.

One pomegranate yields about a cup of seeds, which in turn will yield about half a cup or more of juice. Drink it straight, freeze it into pops or ice cubes, churn it into sorbet, or boil it down with some sugar to make pomegranate syrup.

A lot of Mediterranean history is wrapped up in the name, lore and reality of the pomegranate. Goblets in the shape of pomegranates have been discovered at the site of ancient Troy, for instance.

The plant’s botanical name is Punica granatum, Latin for the “seedy fruit of the Phoenicians.” Seafaring Phoenicians founded Carthage in the first millennium BCE on the coast of North Africa, and had epic clashes with the Romans. When Islam took over large parts of southern Spain in the Eighth Century, the Moors (Moroccans) brought the pomegranate plant with them and founded the city of Granada, the Spanish word for pomegranate.

We also hurl grenades, so called because they resemble pomegranates, and the boiled down and sweetened juice of the fruit is called grenadine.

Send your food and wine related questions to Press Democrat Food Writer Diane Peterson at diane.peterson@pressdemocrat.com.