This Is Truly the Best Way to Eat a Grapefruit

In short, as Erica Lea, who also writes about food at Buttered Side Up, explains, before you use a spoon to dig out the fruit from a halved grapefruit, you need to use a sharp knife with a serrated edge to carve out around and in between each section in order to separate the good stuff from the bitter membrane. Once you’ve done this enough times, you’ll get pretty good at it—I can prep both halves in about a minute—and if you’ve done your job right, you’ll wind up eating very nearly all of the juicy part and very little of the pith.

Because I am open-minded, I also attempted the other methods Erica outlines in her video. She’s obviously much more skilled at prep than I am, but I found all of them basically impossible without making a huge mess.

• Method 2 (peel and section it like an orange) is tricky and time-consuming (for me—she describes it as quick, hmm) and you wind up eating a lot more pith.
• Method 3 (cut it into sections and then trim away the peel) looks pretty but, again, leaves you with a lot of pith.
• Method 4 (which is Method 2, but you peel each individual section after separating them) is basically impossible, as the membrane around each section is difficult to remove without mangling the fruit inside.
• Method 5 (Erica’s preferred option) requires a lot of skill with a knife and a lot of tedious pith removal, and is basically just Method 1 (which is, I’ll remind you, the best way to eat a grapefruit), but first you have to peel the fruit. I’ll stick with with what I know, thanks. But then again, she does call it the “pro” method, and I am definitely not a pro.

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