how do you pick a good pomelo?

So I really liked the pomelo sorbet at village creamery, and there's a pomelo salad in thompson's thai cooking I've been wanting to try so I picked one up at oakton market the other day. I was kinda stumped on what to go on though, do i want one that is more yellowy orange - or can that mean overripeness? blemishes? In the end, I went with my normal citrus fruit strategy, one heavy for its size. When opening it up (I've never used pomelo before) I was kinda suprised by the amount of pith - a good 1/2 inch layer all around the actual usable fruit.

anyway, the salad tuyrned out pretty nicely, though I didn't use the land crab roe (didn't have any) or the cooked shrimp (in deference to wife's vegginess), though could see how that would have emerilized the dish, like they do in banan blossom salad.

advice on picking pomelo in the future would be appreciated- or do folks like substituting grapefruit, maybe its just me but the pomelo seemed to have less bitterness

I'm no Pomelo expert, but I do eat them as a snack quite often because they are a bit less tart them grapefuits. I don't know how to pick them, but I can say the amount of pith you describe is normal. In my experience, they always have much more pith than a grapefruit.

You're right, pomelo is tricky. You've rightly assumed that looking for the heaviest fruit is best. And, given the amount of pith pomelo carries, a large one is significantly easier to deal with then two small ones.

We always used a good knife - a bread knife? - and cut off the top of the fruit. It might take a few tries until you've cut far enough down to get to the fruit rather then simply into pith. From here we would peel off segments of the pith in handfuls, like you would peel an orange except with more effort, of course! It's hard to describe without photos - my apologies. The idea is to pull off as much of the pith as you can at once.

Once we had the pith removed, we would also cut off the inner skin, which was done by removing each invidual segment and slicing open the top of it. The skin should then peel away from both sides easily and only needs to be ripped off at the bottom. The Indonesians I grew up with were skilled at this and for breakfast we always had a bowl of perfect, big and juicy citrus segments. Without having seen it done and had some practice, pomelo is tricky and can be messy.... but oh, it's worth it if it's a good one. I'm seeing it get more press as time goes by, but it may be a few more years before people discover where to find the best fruit and just how great it on its own.

Are you describing something like making supremes of an orange?

No, actually, although having a video would certainly be the best way to illustrate this.

I would cut off the top of the pomelo as they do the orange in the video, but nearly everything else I would do by hand (pulling off the pith, peeling off the skin). In the end of the video the orange slices are pith/skinless, but it's obvious that they have been sliced with a knife. Ideally when done peeling a pomelo the way they do where I grew up, you have slices that look as though the skin has just fallen off - they are completely whole.

A helpful & humorous piece about picking & peeling a pummelo:
http://www.xomba.com/not_a_gargantuan_g ... _a_pummelo

That site is very humorous, but sounds like a lot more work than I go through to get to my pomello. I just slip the knife down the side, cutting all the way through the pith but trying not to cut into the fruit. I do this a couple more times, and then just pull back the sections, slipping a finger under the narrow edge at the top and separating the section from the fruit. Then I just pull the sections apart, like I would a tangerine, and peel off the touch "film" starting from the center strip that was facing the center of the fruit. It just breaks apart along that line and peels back easily (more often than note) along the the whole side of the section. The nice thing about the "skin" that covers the section being so tough is that you don't really have to wrap the uneaten remainder of the pomello, as the thick skin protects the fruit so well.