Another vote for all the press on antioxidants being a determining factor, but I’d say also: it doesn’t taste weird, but it’s more interesting and novel than, say, cherry. It could pass for some kind of cranapple type blend.
That said, if you actually like the flavor, as I do, you can often find bottles of cheap “pomegranate molasses” (unsweetened concentrate) in the ethnic section of large grocery stores in the US. If you have access to a Middle Eastern or Mediterranean shop, all the better. We see “al Wadi*****” brand most often.
*Warning: that link goes to a sub-frame; if you backtrack to the main site, you may be exposed to some default music, a peppy-pop Arabic ad jingle.
You can either chew up the whole thing and swallow it (it’s considered useful fiber), or you can chew/suck the red part from off the seed part and then spit out the seed. Your call; it’s a matter of personal taste.
Ha. It was a profile of these people, the Resnicks, who, yes, bought farmland that had pomegranate trees on it and decided to start pushing pomegranate juice.
Here’s the sort of thing they’re using to ride the antioxidants craze:
Hard to argue with that–who’s not going to want their personal little superhero cruising around in their bloodstream?
Anything to suggest it might be hard on a first-grader’s digestion but ok for adults? IIRC she treated the matter like it was serious.
They sure would be easier to eat without spitting out seeds. It already takes some work, cutting them open and scooping out the “shrapnel.” Unless they have a bad taste, I’d just eat the seeds.
It seems it’s a lot like cranberries. Growing up, cranberries only came out at Thanksgiving, and then they came from a jar. Then they were “THE HOT THING”, became more common, but still cost a lot. Now bottle of cranberry juice sit right next to the apple juice.
10 years ago, Fuji apples were new, and cost much more then the average apple. Today, they actually one of the cheaper, more common apples in the store.
I wouldn’t be surprised if pomegranates, and especially juice, were a common, but not special, thing in a couple of years.
Artificial pomegranate flavor has been extremely popular, for a very long time. You just probably didn’t realize it, because it’s always labeled as artificial cherry flavor.
You see, artificial cherry flavor isn’t meant to taste like fresh cherries; it’s meant to taste like maraschino cherries. Which are bottled in grenadine syrup, and end up taking most of their flavor from the grenadine. So artificial cherry flavor = something that tastes like maraschino cherries = something that tastes like grenadine syrup = something that tastes like pomegranate.
I asked this very question a few months ago and the thread tanked, so I’m really glad to see some answers here!
My pomegranate story: When I was a kid, over the Christmas holiday, my mom would keep my sister and me from driving her crazy by giving us each a half a pomegranate and a little cocktail pick so we could carefully worry the seeds out. One. At. A. Time. And “carefully” because mom warned us that pomegranate juice stained and she’d kill us if we got it on anything. Kept us quiet for hours, it did.
I was coming in here to say exactly this. It was the New Yorker, by the way, re Lynda Resnick. She seemed to have the Midas touch about a lot of things, lucky her.
I tried pomegranates when I was a kid and was not impressed, except at the appearance – exotic (to me), little jewels inside, my cousin called the “pome-grannies,” etc.
The juice is good but I agree it’s quite expensive?
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is that POM finally figured out an economical (on a relative scale, it’s still bloody expensive) way to juice them. If you don’t juice it carefully enough, you crush too many of the seeds/pith and it became unpalatably bitter.
People sort of knew that it was going to be a big flavor but it would have been impossible to market the fruit. Once widespread pomegranate was available in convenient juice form, then all that marketing stuff happened.
These fads come and go. Pomegranate was one of the hot flavors of the late Roman Republic, just before the time of Julius Caesar, around 100 BC. It was also the ‘reddest’ of the fruits they had available, so beautiful lips were referred to as ‘red as pomegranates’. (Nowadays we’d say cherry-red lips, but cherries were not available in ancient Rome.)
