Saturday, April 19, 2008

Knock Knock


Who's there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock Knock.
Who's There?!?!
Banana.
Banana WHO?!!!!!!
Orange you glad you met me!

Oh bad jokes...sorry.

So, today...I'm going through my list of posts to do and think the best for today is dealing with oranges.

Orange Supremes to be exact...orange segments. No white pithy parts. No fiberous parts. Just juicy, sweet orange segments. Let's get started.



Pick your fruit from the market. Don't worry if you have a few blemishes on the skin, you're going to remove it anyway.

Start by cutting the top and bottoms off the orange. Cut in deep enough to expose the inside of the fruit.

See? Both ends cut off.

How we'll start to cut the rest of the peel off of the orange. Resting the orange on your cutting board, place your knife at the top of the orange, right at the edge of the fruit, before the peel begins. Carefully slice your knife down towards the bottom of the fruit, trying your best to keep the knife inside the orange and not cutting into the peel.

Continue this process all around the fruit. Then go back and remove what you can of the extra white bits that hang on. Save the peels and squeeze the juice out of those extra bits.

Now you need to pick up your orange and start to cut the segments. Look for the parts of the internal peel that delineate the segments. In this photo you see two white lines running from the top to the bottom. Place your knife as close to the inside of the white seam; cut into the fruit, roughly to the center of the orange. Repeat the cut on the opposite side of the segment.

There it is. Your first segment of orange. Now start working your way all around the orange, remove all the segments.

Here's what you'll have left when your done. Squeeze the remaining juice out and into the bowl you have saved your segments in.

These are the segments from one orange.

Here are three oranges and all the extra juice.

I don't know about you, but this is my favorite way to eat and orange. When I try to peel an orange and eat the segments, I often have trouble chewing parts of the fruit and kinda need to spit out part of the fruit. Unpleasant. But the supreme segments are just lovely. Small bites of simple, sweet fruit. The supreme segments are a great way to incorporate orange, or grapefruit into a freshing salad.

Enjoy!

1 comment:

Dancer in DC said...

I love the step-by-step photographs. I think I can even do this now.