Pomegranate is delicious, but getting the seeds, which you ultimately only eat, is not that easy. Pomegranates are fresh, fruity, and rich in vitamins, but only if they are ripe enough. Unripe fruits taste very sour and do not keep for long. And you can find out here how to tell if a pomegranate is ripe.
Start of the season in autumn
An indication of whether a fruit is ripe or not is when it is offered. Pomegranates are mainly grown north of the equator and are therefore ready to be harvested in autumn, like other native fruits. There are also cultivation areas south of the equator, but the fruits that are available in summer usually cannot keep up with those in winter. They have to be harvested unripe due to the much longer transport routes. The fruits do not ripen, making them usually more acidic.
If you have pomegranates in your garden yourself, you can also harvest the fruit in autumn. Fruits that are no longer ripe should be removed before overwintering.
How to Tell if A Pomegranate Is Ripe?
Whether you own one grown pomegranate tree in the garden or buy the fruit in the supermarket, you should do a ripeness test before harvesting or buying. There are different indications by which you can recognize ripe fruit or test whether it is ripe.
Characteristics of ripe pomegranates:
- irregularly colored shell
- Shell may be cracked and rough
- Shell is firm but crushable
- Inflorescence dried up
- metallic sound when knocked
Open ripe fruit
Ripe pomegranates are easy to open compared to unripe fruit. You don’t need a knife to cut it open, you can simply pull apart the pericarp starting with the remains of the blossom. At most, you need a small cut in the area of the remainder of the blossom.
The advantage of ripe fruit is that the pits not only taste very fruity but also simply fall out. As a result, almost no juice is lost when opening. Cores that are stuck can be carefully scraped out with a spoon. However, you should use gloves and wear an apron, because splashes on clothing are very difficult to remove.
Storage time
The fact that the fruits no longer ripen is also an advantage when it comes to storage because they can be stored a little longer than other exotic fruits. If you store the pomegranates in a cool storage room at temperatures around 10°C, you can store the fruit for several weeks. Instead of storing the fruit, you can also preserve or process it in different ways.
The freshly squeezed juice is a vitamin bomb in the morning or you can preserve the juice by boiling it down. The seeds can also be used to make jellies, or you can freeze them if you’re not sure what to make with the pomegranate seeds.