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You can also cut the fruit in half and immerse it in a bowl of water to fit your fruit & hands. You can separate fruit & seeds and simply strain out the seeds when your done. Another "messless" solution...

I would like to know, how you know if a pomagranate is ripe or not. I would love to pick so up from the store, but I wouldn't be able to know which to choose.
Can anyone tell me?

@ nickel525

A pomegranate is ripe when it starts splitting its sides. However, I have only seen this happen with the ones I get from the farmers market, which are organic.

Otherwise, with the ones that you get from the supermarket, including those from Whole Foods (in my city Whole Foods' pomegranates are from the POM company), it is a crap shoot as to the state of the pips after you have cut it open. I do not purchase pomegranates that have soft spots. I have found that the pips in the area of the soft spot are rotted when I open it up.

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Another method, which is not messy, to open up a pomegranate and easily release its pips:

1. Do not roll it. Only roll it if you want juice. If you roll it you crush the pips.

2. Lay it on its side, then slice off the top.

3. Sit it on its bottom and score it, being careful to cut only the skin, in quarters (four sections).

4. Using both hands, pull it apart.

5. Now you can pluck out the pips. No mess. And your pips remain intact. Yum!

also, excited that I learned a new term! "pips"!

On Martha Stewart today she sort of combined the method by boogaloobaby and the one in the video. She scored the skin into quarters, leading out from top. Then she split it from the top, broke it into the quarters, and hit them on the back with a wooden spoon over a bowl, like the video. It was really fast and clean.

Rolling and hitting it pops too many seeds. I score the pomegranate into sections and break it apart using the blossom end as leverage. Then I immerse it into a bowl of water and release the seeds. The water helps separate the seeds from the membrane. The membrane will float and the now cleaned seed sink.

I also cut in into quarters and then submerge in water. It really is a minimal mess that is created, mostly occasional pom juices squirting when I accidentally lift it out of the water.

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