Padma Lakshmi can’t stop eating pomegranates.
“My hyperfixation right now because of the season is always pomegranates,” she tells TODAY.com after making Yogurt Chicken and Potato Podimas from her new cookbook on the show.
Specifically, she loves to put pomegranate arils on PB&J in place of jelly. She calls it “pom toast.”
“Scroll and see 14 posts put up at midnight on my Instagram of me in my PJ’s eating sourdough toast with peanut butter and pomegranate,” she says.
As for the tedious task of extracting the arils from the fruit, her trick, she says, is “patience.”
“You make five slits around [the stem], it pulls off, and then you can look inside and see the veining, and you just drag your chef’s knife [along the veins] and you pull [the segments] apart,” she says.
“Do not cut through, do not smash them with a ladle, or it’s juice everywhere,” she warns.
She has a more in-depth tutorial on her Instagram:
Lakshmi also shares the three ingredients she couldn’t live without (aside from pomegranates, of course): Kashmiri chile powder, sumac and tamarind.
Her biggest culinary pet peeve, though, is when people write recipes that are “4,000 lines long with three pots and 14 spices you only use once.”
Her latest cookbook, “Padma’s All American: Tales, Travels, and Recipes from Taste the Nation and Beyond,” includes more than 14 spices, she says, “but you don’t use them all in one dish.”
“You’ll use some of them in many dishes,” she adds.
