On the shelling of citrus fruits

My apologies here as pro temp I shall soon be using the grapefruit in stills to roughly demonstrate what I am talking about but later shall replace them with, hopefully, a video using a lemon and/or an orange.

As a kid I was sent to school with sandwiches and an orange. The orange was impossibly thick skinned and pithy and there was no way my little fingers could penetrate the skin to get into it.

Like some animal we see on nature programs these days dropping stones on shellfish or bashing nuts with rock, my way was to throw the orange at a wall or onto the ground with all my force to split it and thus get a start-messy but it worked.

I noticed other kids came with oranges where the skin had been spirally peeled and then re-wrapped in the skin - altogether easier.

   Much later when it didn’t matter and to the present day I use a different technique of peeling citrus fruit for a variety of reasons however it it just great for kids taking fruit to school or lunch or anywhere.

Wash the fruit especially around its equator.

Using a sharpish and idealy slightly serrated knife just cut through the skin into the pith around its equator.

        Here the knife looks a lot deeper than just skin deep but grapefruit have a thick puffy skin.

Holding half the fruit in one hand, and using a slightly curved end of a teaspoon handle feel your way under one side of the equatorial cut you have made working into the pith, and rotating the fruit, allow the handle to ease the skin off following your line around the ‘equator’.

The curve of the spoon handle sits neatly around the pulp of the grapefruit but not in it.

Keep the spoon handle in the pith - that is between the surface of the skin and the flesh under the pith. Working toward the pole on that side is the aim but don’t free it from the pole yet.

Start on the other half but again leave the shell attached at the pole.

Now to access the inner fruit the shells can be twisted on each other and this will free them from the poles and presto a fruit ready to eat for you kids or for anybody’s packed lunch.

 

Now the twisting action of the halves free's the remaining pith from the poles of the fruit.

Of course the shelled fruit can be segmented in any fashion, re-capped, placed in a neat fitting plastic bag with a twist tie to hold it all together.

        Here the two caps with their segments are being placed together to make a natty bundle.

        
       - or popped on a plate ready to eat!

In my warm and raw vegetable salad I use a lot of lemon juice and citrus pulp to flavour and bulk it out but I don’t want always to use all the juice and pulp therein at once. So this is what I do.

Having shelled the lemon as above and left it attached to the poles I cut it in half and de-pip it, keeping the pips to be ground up with pomegranate seeds to go later into carrot,apple and beetroot ice blocks.

Using a common lemon squeezer (remember the stellate ridges are highly efficient if they are sharp and not blunt as many seem to be) I get the juice and most of the pulp out. That that remains is the hard and fibrous septa of the lemon. Great  for flavouring, and as I have said for bulking out a vegetable salad. It is really tough and a good source of fibre. Anyway I pop it in the fridge and use it later - just cutting the pole off the lemon and it falls out free ready to be chopped and added.