I crave grapefruit with a passion in the wintertime. Its tangy juiciness is so refreshing. But let's face it: Grapefruit can be a pain to eat, especially in the morning, when you're short on time. Here's how I've been cutting mine up lately — it makes eating grapefruit much neater and easier, for maximum enjoyment of its juicy yumminess.
When eating a grapefruit, you can go a few different ways. You can peel it and divide it into segments, like an orange. But a grapefruit has much tougher membranes than an orange, and personally I find them unpleasant to munch.
Another way to eat the grapefruit is to cut it in half, and scoop out the segments with a serrated grapefruit spoon. I love doing this, especially when the grapefruit has been broiled with a little cinnamon sugar (yum!). But I think of this as part of a leisurely weekend breakfast, when I have time to poke around in the grapefruit with a spoon. I do feel, too, that you lose a lot of juice this way.
The third option in eating a grapefruit is to do what I will show you here: Segment the fruit into slices that have been lifted away from their membranes. This gives you neat slices of grapefruit for eating with breakfast, or in a salad.
This looks time-consuming and fussy — there are quite a few steps! But once you've done it a few times and have got the hang of it, it is very speedy and easy. In my opinion, it's the quickest, easiest way to eat a whole grapefruit and really enjoy it. You do lose a little of the flesh when slicing away the peel, but if your knife skills are good, it shouldn't be too much.
You can do this with oranges, too — see our post on that here:• How to Segment an Orange (or Any Citrus Fruit)
There are a couple differences when doing a grapefruit; I think it's easier to handle the larger fruit when it is cut in half, for instance.
What You Need
Ingredients
Grapefruit
Equipment
Cutting board
Sharp knife
A towel to mop up the juice!
Instructions
1. Cut the grapefruit in half, top to bottom (not around the center).
2. Lay one half flat on the cutting board and whittle away the skin, leaving as much fruit as you can behind.
3. Take off all of the thick peel.
4. Slice off the top cap of peel.
5. If there are thick ropes of pith still left on the grapefruit, peel these away.
6. Slice carefully into one segment of the grapefruit, as close to a membrane as possible, and make a slit to loosen the segment of fruit.
7. Make a slit on the other side, as close to the membrane as possible, and loosen the fruit completely.
8. Lift out the segment of fruit. (Think of this process like removing pages of a book, in between the covers.)
9. Repeat. At the end, you should have a loose "book" of membranes with the fruit removed.
Additional Notes:
• As I said above, I think that this does lose a little bit of fruit to the peels, but no more than when you eat a grapefruit with a spoon, and good knife skills will help you remove a lot of peel without losing too much fruit.
Want more smart tutorials for getting things done around the home?
See more How To posts
We're looking for great examples of your own household intelligence too!
Submit your own tutorials or ideas here!
(Images: Faith Durand)
How To Cook Fluffy, Tasty Quinoa
How to Make Buckwheat Soba Noodles from Scratch
Good Food to Share 
The Big Book of Small, Cool Spaces 
Apartment Therapy Presents 
The Eight-Step Home Cure 
Martha Concrete Lam...
Dirty Little Secrets of Tidy Families
Hillary & Michael's Refined Roost
ALWAYS USE A SHARP KNIFE!
I've never cut a citrus in half to do this...it doubles your work! Just slice off the peel at both ends, rest it on one of those ends and then cut it off (following the contour of the fruit) from end to end. Then just cut the "pages" out. I find that after the first section is removed, I can slide the knife in on my dominant side (right, 'cause I'm a righty), kinda slide it across the bottom, and then run the edge of the knife up the other side and it pops out.
When done, squeeze the left-behind membranes for all that great juice!
I always butcher grapefruits trying to cut them up so this is awesome! I usually just end up cutting it in half and drizzling each half with honey and attacking it with a spoon. Seriously grapefruit with honey is maybe the best snack ever.
I have been doing this all winter, but *always* over a bowl so I can catch all that wonderful juice!
Seconding Tatterhood's suggestion to just cut off the top and bottom, and NOT cut the fruit in half. Classic citrus supréme.
um, that's way toooo many steps! follow what Tatterhood said. So much faster!
This seems like a lot of work to me... I actually just grew up peeling it like an orange, and then peeling each individual section out of the membrane so all you have are the little jewels of grapefruit sections. No bitterness from the white pith or membrane--just juicy grapefruit goodness. It's a bit messy, but worth it :)
Because chewing is so overrated...
Make it even easier...just eat the membrane.
I guess the advantage of cutting it in half is that you could rest one half at a time on the cutting board as you slice out the segments. I think it makes the peeling way too hard though. I do exactly what Tatterhood described and then just hold it in my hand to cut out the segments. If your knife is sharp, this is easy. And if you really wanted to lay it on the cutting board you still could, book-style, after the first two or three segments were out.
We've been eating a lot of grapefruit this winter and to save time, I've taken to just peeling the grapefruit and chopping it into large bite sized chunks, as if roughly chopping an onion. It's fast, not as messy as cutting into supremes, and you get the fiber from the membranes without having to bite through them on the outside of each segment to get to the more delicate pulp. Works well when you're not trying to impress someone with presentation.
Or get a curved grapefruit knife like I did :)
Re: cutting the grapefruit in half, these grapefruit were quite large, and my hands are small, so I was more comfortable segmenting half at a time. But you can certainly do it the more traditional way as well! (as seen in the segmenting an orange How To linked above). Like I said, once you've done this a couple times it's really quick, however you decide to do it.
I inherited grapefruit spoons from my grandma; they're jagged at the tip and are perfect for the more traditional segment-scooping once the grapefruit is halved.
Yeah, don't cut it in half. Cut the ends off and peel with a knife around the fruit. I find that a serrated knife is actually much easier for this purpose, and definitely over a bowl! Then squeeze the remaining membranes and any pieces of peel/ends that have a significant amount of flesh on them. Don't waste anything, grapefruit season is short!
I usually buy the smallest grapefruits I can find (the size of a medium-large orange), so those are easy to segment the traditional way. I could definitely see cutting in half for some of the larger varieties, though.
I use my chef's knife and cup the fruit in my left hand, over a bowl, as I cut with my right. I squeeze all the juice out, since I'm usually prepping a salad when I cut my grapefruit this way (grapefruit and raw pistachios has become a favorite salad combination in my house, cheese optional).
I do this everytime -- I usually cut up 3 or 4 and put them in the fridge -- Love some ruby red extra cold. My son loves it too & no choking on the white membranes :)
I have one of these double-ended knives:
http://www.crateandbarrel.com/kitchen-and-food/prep-utensils/grapefruit-knife/s539716
and it is GREAT. I sometimes make citrus supremes for salads, but even with practice, it takes me a long time. With this knife, I cut a grapefruit in half and put it in a bowl, cut between the segments with the double-blade side, and then cut around the circumference with the curved side. The whole process takes maybe a minute. Plus, the curved tip is really handy for removing pesky seeds. Then I eat the segments with a regular spoon, squeeze the remaining juice into the bowl, and sluuuuurp away!