Last week we had the opportunity to buy a case of pomegranates, so I figured why not? 🙂 They’re really healthy, we can make jelly, juice, or syrup from them, and we’ve been drinking more of the “speciality” juices from the store which are expensive. Now I know what you’re thinking – don’t you know how hard they are to peel?! Yes, but with our handy steam juicer I thought we wouldn’t have to go through the entire process. Key word there- thought.
But first, here’s how I started the peeling process. First I cut the top and bottom off, them made one cut down the side. This makes it easy to peel open.
From here I broke each half into pieces and stuck them into the steam juicer. After an hour of steaming, we let the juice cool and tried it. The resulting juice was slightly bitter! Yet the seeds are very sweet when eaten fresh. Turns out steaming the peel releases its bitterness, along with the juice from the seeds.
On to attempt two. I peeled several down to the seeds until there was enough for another try in the juicer.
This time I created a slow boil, just enough to get the steam going, and let them steam for an hour until the seeds lost their bright color and juice. The resulting juice was bright and sweet! Yeah!
Just out of curiosity I hand-crushed a few of the seeds to compare the difference in juice. Not much. There was a slight ‘crispness’ (for lack of a better word) that the cold-pressed juice had, but unless you tried each side by side like we did, I don’t know how you’d really tell the difference.
So the good news is the juicer works well for juicing pomegranates, but you still have to peel them first. Here are a few other ways I found on the internet that people use to juice pomegranates:
- Mesh screen colander – Peel, then take seeds and press through colander screen for juice.
- Ziploc bag – this one is obvious. Peel and put seeds into bag. Use hands or rolling pin to squish juice from seeds. Very time consuming.
- Fruit juicer – I would have liked to try this one if we had a fruit juicer, though some people said the seeds clogged the filters resulting in a giant mess.
- Fruit strainer – Again, would like to have tried. This is using something like a Victorio Food Strainer. The manual for this model says you can use the apple or berry screen to juice pomegranates, but I haven’t tried it myself.
If you don’t want to mess with trying to juice them, you can always just freeze the seeds, then eat as you like since they don’t break down when frozen.
Happy Juicing!
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