Preparing Pomegranate for Cranberry Sauce

Video Transcript

"I'm Stephanie Barnett on behalf of Expert Village, and today we're going to make Christmas Cranberry Sauce. Oh, that smells good! This is a pomegranate. They're a lovely fruit. They're full of vitamins and antioxidants. This is one of the best things that you can eat during the winter when they're in season. You want to look for red, firm pomegranate. You don't want brown spots, you don't want them to look dry and shriveled, you just want a really firm pomegranate. And now I'm going to show you how to cut it open and get the seeds out in a relatively painless process. Lightly slice off the top of the pomegranate. You see, I didn't even cut down into where the seeds were, because then this makes it easier. I just make a little cut in that pomegranate. That's all you really need because you don't want to cut all off the seeds. I'm then going to pry it open. See? Beautiful, red seeds. But there's a lot of membrane and this is a very painstaking process if you're going to pick out all the seeds like this. And it's messy so do not wear your best clothes. A much easier way to get the pomegranate seeds out of the pomegranate is to take a wooden spoon and whack it. Hold the edge of the pomegranate skin, and you just whack it. See, the seeds come out. You may have to pick out a few seeds and a few membranes that fall down, but this is a much easier process to get the pomegranate seeds out then picking it all out by hand. You can also pull it open a little bit, lightly whack. Again, don't wear good clothes because it does splatter and this does stain. So, lightly whack, and it just releases the seeds from the pomegranate. We've got a few more there I'm going to do those by hand. And if you see, like this seed right there's brown, it's not so good, don't put it in the bowl. And you can check the bowl for those seeds as well, that have gone off and aren't so good. You'll find a few of those in every pomegranate and you just to be careful and watch out for those. So, again, take your half a pomegranate over the bowl, whack it with the back of a wooden spoon. See? Got a lot of those out of there. Much easier. It could take half an hour to do this by hand. You'll get a little more juice with it, but that's OK. That will be a nice addition to the cranberry sauce. So just keep whacking and see that that came out. Pull all of that out. You do not want any of this white membrane. It's bitter, it doesn't taste good, and it has a strange texture. So make sure that that's all out. You might have a little bit of the white bits on the ends of the seeds-that's OK. But the big white membrane you don't want any of that going in your cranberry sauce."