How to Deseed a Pomegranate {Tutorial}

Learn how to deseed a pomegranate perfectly every time with this helpful visual step-by-step tutorial.

If you’ve never tried opening and deseeding a pomegranate before, odds are you’re a little cluelessas to what to do. 

Ahhh, I remember my first time attempting to open a pomegranate. It was horrible.

11 years old. December 6th. A butterknife. That’s where it went terribly wrong.

Now, I’m guessing you’re going to be a heck of a lot smarter than a 11 year old anxious to eat some dang pomegranate seeds. 

I started hacking away at the thing, stabbing it, ripping off shred after shred of the peel. I was getting nowhere fast. Once I finally broke into the thing, seeds went EVERYWHERE.

Falling all over the floor, getting ground into red stains on the floor, pith in my baby sister’s hair, stained fingers and faces. And this is how me and my siblings did it. Every. single. time.

Despite that now I’m older and have way more mental establishments, I haven’t had a pomegranate in years. 

So obviously when I picked a pomegranate up from the grocery store to be topped on coconut chia seed pudding a few weeks back, I had no idea how get the freaking thing open. Nor did I have a clue how to get the precious seeds out without making a whale of a mess.

So I did a little searching. Since I’m more of a visual learner, I looked for videos on how to do. And in a matter of minutes I found a method that looked easy and simple. (You can check out that video here). This tutorial is basically the picture tutorial of that video.

So, without further ado, here’s a tutorial for how to deseed a pomegranate perfectly every time!

Note: Pith is the white tissue that separates the seeds. It doesn’t taste bad, but it doesn’t taste great. It’s best to remove all of the pith before eating or storing the seeds.

Start with a clean, ripe pomegranate. If you can find organic, that would be the best.

About an inch from the top, slice it shallowly around the pomegranate. It’s perfectly fine if it’s not a perfect circle.

Then pop the “lid” off. If you’re having trouble with the lid, start pulling up and when you can see the center, cut it off.

By cutting shallowly, less of the pomegranate seeds will be broken or halved. Broken pomegranate seeds = a staining mess. 

Look at the center of the pomegranate. As you’ll see, it’s a star-shape. Using a sharp knife, slice the pomegranate in five places—the “points” of the star.

Once you have your 5 lines, cut all the way to the center. This way, we can break the pomegranate into five equal pieces without broken pith everywhere.

Break the pomegranate apart into 5 pieces. If you cut it correctly, you will be able to see a solid wall of pith covering most of the seeds. This is good because we can just tear it off, instead of picking through all of the seeds to find and remove the pith.

After you tear off all of the pith, you’re left with a ruby-studded chunk of pomegranate. Then, popping off the seeds is a breeze. 

Place the seeds in a bowl after removing them from the pomegranate. I like to toss the pith and peels of the pomegranate in my compost bin, but you could just discard them if you’d like.

 

And that’s it! Who knew deseeding a pomegranate could be so easy and mess-free!

Have you ever deseeded a pomegranate? If you’ve tried this method, how did it go for you? Let me know in the comments below!