Bitter & sweet
Learn how to pick the ripest grapefruit by feel and taste
Texas grapefruit are in season and on sale at my local bodega. The ruby-fleshed, bittersweet orbs looked shrunken and beat up, which is not necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, it may mean they are ripe.
My dad made sure his son knew how to choose a grapefruit, and he would have been excited by the contents of this bin. His technique is to press on the bottom — if the skin feels thin and you can press it in, it’s ready. If the skin feels thick and spongy, it’s not perfect. In my experience as a grapefruit chooser, the old, dented grapefruit like the ones I was digging through often fit that bill. I gently prodded the bottoms of these marginal-looking grapefruit until I had about 15.
At home, I peeled and opened one, and saw the confirmation I was looking for: the membranes between sections had ripped open when I pulled the fruit apart, revealing the pink, juicy vesicles inside. In less-ripe specimen, the sections would separate from one another, but not split open like the mouths of hungry baby birds.
Once you get the hang of assessing grapefruit by pushing on their bottoms, you’ll realize how rare it is to find a grapefruit that is ready. Most, it seems, are harvested too early. Maybe the grapefruit merchants figure that people expect them to be a little too sour and a little too bitter. Those same challenging flavors are evident even in a perfectly ripe one, too, but are balanced by enough sweetness.
The bitterness of grapefruit contributes to its medicinal aura, as most medicines are bitter. The fruit’s high levels of vitamin C are important, too, but the medicinal qualities unique to grapefruit are in that bitterness. “I eat grapefruit when I feel sick,” noted a friend of mine recently. “It just feels like it will help.”
Grapefruit seed extract is a popular plantbased remedy with demonstrated antimicrobial and anti-fungal properties. Meanwhile, people with certain health conditions, like high blood pressure or high cholesterol, are well aware that they can’t eat grapefruit when they are on their medications. Grapefruit in your system will make certain drugs more potent — potentially dangerously so — by inhibiting the breakdown of those medications, allowing them to accumulate in the blood. (If grapefruit is your medicine of choice, I guess you don’t have to worry about that effect.)
The intense bitter, sweet and sour flavors in grapefruit allow it to hold its own when mixed with other strong flavors. In this Thai shrimp salad that I learned on an island in the Andaman Sea, the assertive and complex flavor of the grapefruit is countered with the likes of garlic, cilantro, fish sauce and hot pepper flakes. It makes for an exciting salad.