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posted: 3/19/2014 5:45 AM

Discover the right way to do grapefruit

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  • Grapefruit tastes much better if you pair it with salty ingredients, like olives.


By L.V. Anderson, Slate

The world of fruit is a world of controversy, and Serge Gainsbourg's "Lemon Incest" is just the tip of the iceberg. There's the controversy over the right way to peel a banana. There's the controversy over the identity of the forbidden fruit in Genesis -- the list of possibilities includes "the apple, pomegranate, the fig, the carob, the etrog or citron, the pear, the quince and ... the datura." (Then there's the sub-controversy of what the heck the etrog and the datura are.) There's the controversy over tomatoes, and whether they are properly categorized as a fruit even though they moonlight as a vegetable.

And, of course, there's the controversy over grapefruit and its edibility, which my colleague Katy Waldman kindled a little over a year ago with her extremely even-handed article "Grapefruit Is Disgusting". Waldman's argument against grapefruit boiled down to three points: "It's impossible to eat," "It tastes disgusting" and "It's plotting to murder you." The second and third points seem like subjective statements rather than cold, hard facts -- but I would like to wade belatedly into the controversy to address Waldman's first point, which is a common but demonstrably false misunderstanding.

Grapefruit is not impossible to eat; everyone is just eating it incorrectly. The traditional way of eating grapefruit -- by cutting it across the equator and digging out tiny morsels of flesh with the half-serrated utensil known as a grapefruit spoon -- is one of the most frustrating experiences known to man. Waldman is correct when she says that "separating those wedges from the membrane requires you to saw at them like a maniac with the edge of your spoon" and compares the whole ordeal to "shoveling fish."




This recipe, inspired by an orange recipe that The New York Times' Mark Bittman collected from a vegetarian restaurant in the south of France, pairs grapefruit segments with olive puree that looks a little like guacamole and is about as rich. Usually olive tapenade contains lemon juice, but this ultrasimple puree doesn't need any, since the grapefruit provides plenty of acidity already.

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