Pomegranate arils

 

Kroger has been selling fresh pineapples the past few weeks for 98 cents each. I decided I would like to try some pomegranate arils with the pineapple. 

I tried getting the arils (seeds) from a pomegranate decades ago. I do not remember the details, but I swore off such a messy challenge. However, I remember reading on Cafe Sucre Farine blog that Chris also felt intimidated by processing a pomegranate until she heard about a fairly easy way to do it. 

After washing the pomegranate, you cut it in half horizontally. You hold a half in your non-dominant hand seed-side down over a bowl in the sink. Then you whack it with the handle of a wooden spoon. That is her description: do not hit hard, whack hard. 

I was having some seeds fall out, but it was kind of slow-going. When my husband saw what I was doing, he offered to do the whacking. He got a tool from the garage (hammer?) and used the heavy handle. You can see the splatters which is why you want to do it with the bowl in the sink.

You can see that we left a few arils in the "husk". We would have more than enough for our purposes, and Chris suggested eating them in 3 or 4 days or freezing them after that. Some of the white "membrane" falls into the bowl during whacking, but it isn't very hard to pick out of the arils.

I may try putting some arils on my cereal; maybe my husband will try some in his yogurt. The link I gave above has lots of suggestions for using pomegranate arils. Now that I have found an easier way to process them, I may buy some more pomegranates from time to time.