Pomegranate

Pomegranate: freshness and ripeness guide

Pomegranates are non-climacteric: they do not ripen, redden, or sweeten after they are picked, so the fruit in the bin is exactly as good as it will ever be and selection is the whole job — there is no buying a hard one to come around on the counter. The single most reliable cue is weight: pick the fruit up and choose the one that feels heavy for its size, because heft means the seeds (arils) inside are plump and full of juice rather than dried and shrivelled. Look for skin that is deep and richly coloured for the variety — most common types run from bright red to a deep reddish-brown — and that is firm, taut, and leathery rather than soft or papery. A ripe pomegranate is often slightly squared or flat-sided rather than perfectly round, because the swollen arils press the rind outward into facets, and the crown (the flowered end) should be closed or only slightly open. Surface scratches and a little russeting are cosmetic and fine; deep splits in the skin are not.

Because there is no ripening to wait for, a sound pomegranate is ready to eat the day it is bought, and the way to have good fruit later in the week is its exceptional keeping quality, not patience. A whole pomegranate holds for up to a week at room temperature and for one to two months in the refrigerator, far longer than most fresh fruit, so it is worth choosing a few heavy, deeply coloured ones at once. Loose arils, once you have opened the fruit, are far more perishable and should be refrigerated in a sealed container and eaten within about five days, or frozen on a tray and bagged for longer storage.

A pomegranate is past its prime when it has dried out from the inside: a fruit that feels light for its size, or whose skin has gone hard, brittle, and cracked, usually has shrivelled, leathery arils and little juice left. Soft or sunken mushy patches, weeping juice, brown discoloured areas, or any fuzzy mould — most often starting around the crown — mean the fruit is breaking down and should be passed over. One seasonal note for shoppers here: peak pomegranate supply is fall and early winter, when most fruit arrives from California, and the thick leathery rind travels the cold trip home better than delicate produce — but a whole pomegranate is still mostly water, so one left to freeze solid in a sub-zero vehicle will have its juice-filled arils rupture and collapse into mush as it thaws. Bring them indoors promptly in hard winter cold.

Sources:

• UC Davis Postharvest Research and Extension Center — Pomegranate: recommendations for maintaining postharvest quality (non-climacteric behaviour, cold storage life, chilling sensitivity). https://postharvest.ucdavis.edu/produce-facts-sheets/pomegranate
• University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources (UC ANR) — Pomegranate fruit facts and postharvest handling. https://fruitsandnuts.ucanr.edu/pomegranate
• Wonderful Pomegranate (POM Wonderful) — How to select, store, and open a pomegranate. https://www.pomwonderful.com/