5. Good Organic Gardening - September-October 2016 AvxHome.in

pomegranate | PLANT PROFILE
Ruby
red
If eggplant is the “crazy apple”,
pomegranate is apparently the “seeded
apple”, so named for its crimson jewel-like
arils, the only edible part of the plant
Words Kerry Boyne
I’d been using pomegranate molasses in
recipes long before I ever bought a fresh
pomegranate to throw its exploding
ruby-red seeds into a salad. And what a
revelation it was. It brought that salad alive.
Perhaps luckily, this fruit has a limited season
(late summer/autumn) because I’d run the
risk of getting sick of it after putting the gemlike
arils in just about every salad. I use them
in desserts, too.
Some favourite cookbook-writing chefs
— Karen Martini and Yotam Ottolenghi, for
example — use both the fresh fruit and the
molasses a lot because both are inspired
by Middle Eastern cuisine: Australianborn
Martini is from an Italian/Tunisian
background, while Ottolenghi is Israeli by
birth and now a famous UK restaurateur.
A Persian staple, pomegranate (Punica
granatum) originated in the eastern
Mediterranean, North Africa, Afghanistan and
Iran. It became much more widespread, from
the Middle East to the Americas to India and
Asia. A Sri Lankan colleague recalls picking
them from the tree as kids, breaking them
open and eating them, their hands and faces
stained with the scarlet juice. Pomegranates
can be messy for sure, but you become very
adept at releasing the seeds from the white
pith without effort or mess.
Pomegranates can be
messy for sure, but you
become very adept
at releasing the seeds
from the white pith
without effort or mess.
In French, it's called grenade
— hence the term for the
military bomb that resembles it
While its Latin name translates as
“seeded apple”, the pomegranate is actually
a true berry, hence its colour (attributed to
the presence of anthocyanins) and sweet,
tangy lusciousness.
Health benefits
Like all berries, pomegranates confer many
health benefits. They are a very rich source
of vitamin C and other antioxidants and have
been shown to help protect against Alzheimer’s
disease and certain cancers. The compounds
in pomegranates responsible for most of the
health benefits are punicalagins, which are very
powerful antioxidants, and punicic acid, the
main type of fatty acid in the fruit.
The pomegranate’s anti-inflammatory
action makes it helpful in a range of diseases
and conditions, including arthritis, breast and
prostate cancers, type 2 diabetes and heart
Did you know?
Though the name of the Spanish city
of Granada comes from an Arabic
term that has nothing to do with
pomegranate, its coat of arms features
the fruit — in Spanish, granata.
The juice has been found to improve memory
Good Organic Gardening | 19