A few weeks ago I opened the fridge at work to find an avocado a colleague had cut into. Instead of slicing down through the stem and around the pit to create two symmetrical halves, they’d lopped off the narrow top, creating a small opening out of which to scoop the flesh of the avocado. I, mindlessly committed to symmetry, was baffled; I could not understand it.
The next day I found out who the culprit was. There was a logic to it, they claimed – cutting it from the top meant less of the flesh was exposed, minimising oxidation and moisture loss and keeping the avocado fresher for longer.
The method works if you’re looking to spread out your avocado-eating over a few days, but you may not get the optimal eating experience – avocado flesh is creamier the closer it is to the pit.
Melbourne fruit expert Thanh Truong, also known as Fruit Nerd, says the difference in oiliness is evident in the way countries such as Vietnam eat avocados. There, avocados are peeled like apples: “They cut the skin off, cut the green part off … and then they use the yellow part to make a smoothie because that’s the more oily, creamier part.”
Though the jury is out on my colleague’s technique, the internet – and real life – abounds with nice, different and unusual techniques to prepare fresh produce. Here, for your eating pleasure, new – and perhaps improved – ways to peel, slice and juice your fruit.
1. Oranges and mandarins: taking the pith
When it comes to oranges, slicing through the equator and then cutting each hemisphere into wedges is a reliable classic – each wedge has far less pith than if the fruit was sliced from the north to south poles.
Cutting “against the grain of the membrane” in this way means less stringiness, says cookbook author Alice Zaslavsky.
However, if you’re after a more luxurious eating experience, you may want to cut out the more fibrous core of the orange and segment walls entirely, according to Truong. Instead of the “pro waiter” technique of peeling the orange with a knife and cutting supremes – which gives pith-free segments, but also leaves lots of flesh stuck to the fruit’s segment walls – the “Dorm Dude” technique is to slice two large cheeks (as you would a mango) and two smaller cheeks, leaving behind the fibrous core. Each large cheek is cut into three wedges, then the flesh is sliced away from the peel, and the result? Eight juicy, pith-free orange pieces.
Meanwhile, peeling mandarins from the stem end and keeping the segments attached as a ball will allow you to more easily remove the lacy white pith by scraping with a paring knife, as the stringy network tends to come together near the stem.
Removing the pith with a paring knife makes the bigger difference here, but peeling from the stem does make the task easier. There are few things in life that one could describe as being “lovingly scraped”, but there is a tenderness to preparing mandarins like this.
Y'all eat it with or without the lingerie? https://t.co/DwTJl5mcp2
— FRANZ🏴☠️ (@franzakeem) January 31, 2020
2. Passionfruit: off with its head
Conventionally, passionfruit is cut along the equator, which leaves you with two beautiful symmetrical halves plus a sad puddle of juice. But if you lop off the top much like you would chop the top off a boiled egg, you can minimise juice spillage – the method is even endorsed by Passionfruit Australia, who also recommend pouring in a nip of Cointreau for a “no-fuss treat”.
3. Lemons: easy peasy, lemon squeezy
Those lemon-shaped bottles of store-bought juice may not just be a whimsical design, but may have inspired a more natural option of extracting juice. A hack that’s been floating around the internet for a few years allows you to turn any lemon into a squeezy bottle.
Take a lemon and roll it vigorously on your kitchen counter to help break the vesicles and get the juices flowing, then poke a skewer into one end to create an opening, wiggling it around to puncture each of the segments.
“You can actually buy little gadgets that tap the lemon or citrus. That hack is just a makeshift version of that,” Zaslavsky says.
Does it work as well as traditional methods of juicing a lemon? It’s quite a bit slower, but you’ll end up with juice that is completely free of seeds and almost free of pulp – plus, it’s kind of fun.
Zaslavsky has a word of caution, though: “Even though the lemon looks like it’s whole, inside it starts to ferment.” Even if the lemon is stored in the fridge, she says, it will only last “for a couple of days”.
4. Bananas: bend and snap
You may have seen videos of primates peeling bananas “upside down” – that is, using the stem like a handle and peeling from the other end. Proponents of the method say it can reduce the amount of stringy bits left on the banana and gets rid of the astringent black nub at the end (which is actually the remnant of the fruit’s flower).
But Truong says it’s “much of a muchness” which end you peel from. His preferred method (as long as they’re not too ripe) is to snap them in half: “It’s like my party trick,” he says.
“If you pull the two ends of the banana in opposite directions, like stretching it out, [and then] push the banana forward, it just snaps perfectly in half.” Perfect for sharing. Or just for showing off.
5. The grape shake
You might enjoy the idea of languorously dangling a bunch of grapes over your mouth like an ancient Roman partygoer, but regrettably there are situations in life where that’s not appropriate.
If you’re making a fruit salad, packing grapes for school lunches or prepping them for freezing (frozen grapes are a lovely summertime treat), the internet says you can place a bunch inside a ziplock bag, gather the opening of the bag around the stem in one hand, and shake vigorously – you’ll end up with a bag of loose grapes and a denuded stem.
Like the banana snap, this move certainly looks impressive. It might do for grapes what Tom Cruise in Cocktail did for bartenders. It is, however, loud and not entirely foolproof. Although there was a satisfying bounty of felled grapes at the bottom of the bag, a few stragglers were left behind. New? Yes, in my world. Improved? I can’t hear you through my perforated ear drums.
Additional reporting by Yvonne C Lam.
