Thursday, December 13, 2007

Plea for Fruit Related Help

I have recently developed a taste for grapefruit. However, I failed to concurrently develop an innate knowledge of grapefruit-eating technique, and online instructions to "scoop out the sections with a spoon" are not as helpful as they may seem (for instance, do you scoop from the membrane side or the peel side of the section?). I started off trying to scoop the sections out of a halved grapefruit with a teaspoon. This was almost as effective as using a citrus reamer, so I switched to an iced tea spoon, which is narrower with a shallower bowl. I've managed to work into a technique of forcibly digging out one section, tearing the membrane between the missing section and the adjacent section, then working the spoon around the point of that section and wedging it off the peel. This, too, has given unsatisfactory results, unless one of the unsung benefits of grapefruit juice is as an eyeglass cleaner. Around the time I proved that it is, in fact, anatomically impossible to lick grapefruit juice off one's own elbow, I remembered that there exists a utensil helpfully called a "grapefruit spoon," and I procured a set of two. These do not come with instructions.

So, I am asking for help. I know at least two of my readers have extensive grapefruit eating experience. Does someone want to step up with some detailed instructions?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

When my wife's hands got worse, I would use a knife to separate the sections along the membranes, and
(I didn't have a curved knife) try to separate the fruit from the skin also. Then, she could scoop it out with any spoon, but I usually furnished the grapefruit spoon.

Nimrod, being helpful.

Anonymous said...

Not only are there special grapefruit spoons, there are also special grapefruit knives with curved blade and serrated edges. Generally speaking, most people would use the knife to loosen the flesh away from the skin around the the outer edge, then use the spoon with the serrated edge to separate the rest of the section away from the inner membrane, much the way you would section an orange, and then scoop it out and eat. However, my sister always found this much too much work for her, and she would just peel the grapefruit like you would a navel orange or a tangerine, and eat the sections individually.