First taste of grapefruit + useful citrus peeler (akshully peel-starter) tool

Until yesterday evening, I’d never consumed any fresh grapefruit. I had an inkling that it was less sweet than, say, an orange and recall reading or seeing or hearing that some people salted cut grapefruit to mask the bitterness (for a pop-sci explanation, check this October 2020 news article at science.org: Why adding salt makes fruit — and candy — sweeter: The key is a sugar-ferrying protein in taste cells by Ian Randall). But I hadn’t been consciously avoiding grapefruit. It was simply a matter of the stars never quite aligning in a way that led to S. or me going out of our way to grab some grapefruit from the grapefruit bin in the produce section of a supermarket. Primarily, we eat unprocessed fresh meat and vegetables. There isn’t a lot of fruit-eating going on in general. We nosh on blackberries a lot more often than, say, oranges or apples.

The grapefruit got fully peeled and I settled for, as is my habit, breaking the orange down to segments but leaving the segment 'walls' intact and not fussing over removing all of the exocarp aka white rind on the outerward facing sides. — The grapefruit got fully peeled and I settled for, as is my habit, breaking the orange down to segments but leaving the segment ‘walls’ intact and not fussing over removing all of the exocarp aka white rind on the outerward facing sides.

Recently, though, I’d gotten mildly irked enough at the tedium of trying to cut out the stems and cores of tomatoes (particularly smaller ones) with a paring knife before slicing them that I fired up a confuser and poked around on Taobao for some cheap stainless steel vegetable/fruit corers to try. While I was at it, I saw a citrus peeler helper and got one of those as well. We’ve had some oranges recently and hand-peeling an orange isn’t especially taxing but digging your nails in and getting started, tearing off that first scrap of peel is, as with de-stemming a tomato, slightly irksome.

The next time that I went for groceries after the gizmo was delivered, I got some oranges, some grapefruit (pink grapefruit, I think), and a pomelo for testing purposes.

A face-on view of the citrus-peeler assister, with discarded grapefruit segment walls in the background.

Above, you can see the citrus-peel-facing view of the tool, resting on a bed of paper towel on a paper plate. The gadget is only useful in making cuts in a citrus fruit’s peel, not in removing the “walls” between segments (aka the segment epidermis or segment skin). I shucked the juice-sack-laden segments out of their skins by hand, simultaneously plucking out each piece’s off-white seeds. For oranges, I don’t bother to remove the segment skins or try to claw off every last bit of rind (the stuff labeled endocarp albedo in the diagram below, but I wanted to remove other possible sources of bitterness before trying grapefruit for the first time.

A diagram of the internal structure of a citrus fruit, screencapped from a paper by Sadka et al. ('Primary Metabolism in Citrus Fruit as Affected by Its Unique Structure' DOI 10.3389/fpls.2019.01167). — “A diagram of the internal structure of a citrus fruit, screencapped from a paper by Sadka et al. (Primary Metabolism in Citrus Fruit as Affected by Its Unique Structure DOI 10.3389/fpls.2019.01167).

I used the citrus peel starter thingamabob on a grapefruit first and then on an orange, hence the orange juice residue visible on the blade. Yes, the tool has a short, but very sharp, blade. It’s the sharp edge of the short exposed stretch of the thin bar of stainless steel that connects the bottom of the handle to the roughly triangular peel-spreader part. The cutting edge is more clearly visible in this side view of the implement:

Side view of the citrus-peeler assister, with discarded grapefruit segment walls in the background. The sharpened edge, on the thin bar connecting the curved triangular spreader and the thin cylindrical handle, is pointing upwards.

To use it safely (or safe-ish-ly), you move it as though you were unzipping a loose-fitting jacket (with the spreader bit being analogous to the zipper itself and the handle representing the zipper pull). You draw the tool (handle side pointing towards the floor or countertop) from the top of the orange/grapefruit/whatever downwards, grasping the top and back of the fruit with the other hand to keep that hand out of the way of the blade.

A push version would be more ergonomic, but the sharp bit would have to go in front of the triangular spreader part, so maybe this pull design is a bit safer as-is. OTOH, I use kitchen knives, box cutters, saws, etc. every day and don’t injure myself very often, so a push version might still be preferable.

After trying one grapefruit segment lightly salted (which did indeed reduce my perception of the bitterness), I had some sans salt. It wasn’t really that bitter to begin with and I alternated with some of the slices of orange that I’d also peeled. Not earth-shakingly scrumptious, but not bad. Would have again.