Stick around for today’s blog post if you want to know the best way to cut a watermelon. We’ll show you how to cut watermelon easily. Cutting watermelon shouldn’t be challenging at all when you know the right techniques.
How to Cut a Watermelon?
Knowing how to cut watermelon can spell the difference between a perfectly prepared basket or tray of fruits and a disaster. Luckily, it’s easy to learn this skill if you are truly determined to master the process.
What kind of knife do you use to cut a watermelon?
The best kind of knife for large fruits like the watermelon is a full-sized chef’s knife. Chef’s knife measures at least eight inches in length and is best suited for people who want to use less force from their wrist when breaking through the watermelon’s thick skin.
If you use the best kind of knife, there will be barely any struggle with cutting a watermelon, and you can instead use all your energy in scooping up the flesh of the watermelon or creating fancy shapes with the fruit. But as for the cutting, let the sharp blade of the fruit do all the cutting for you.
The basic steps for cutting a watermelon are as follows:
- First thing’s first! Wash your hands thoroughly when handling any fresh fruit. This applies to all kinds of fruits, not just watermelons. Cross-contamination easily happens with fruits and vegetables. Wash even more thoroughly if you handle any fresh or frozen meat before handling any fresh fruits.
- After washing your hands, use running water to rinse the watermelon, too. This is because the watermelon rind may have been exposed to bacteria and other harmful pathogens while outside. Contamination can happen at any junction during the harvest. Some people use a soft brush to make sure that all the soil and dirt are removed. While this is certainly a nice touch, running water will take care of most of the dirt, so don’t worry about it.
- Grab the stables chopping board you have at home. If you have something that is nonslip, use that instead of a lighter board. The reason for this instruction is that watermelons are heavy, and they will push lighter boards away from you while you are aligning the watermelon properly.
- Position the watermelon on top of the chopping board and hold it firmly with one hand. Get your knife and make an incision from the top. Dig the knife inward, and when you have a few inches of the blade in, cut from top to bottom. Try to steady your hand so the blade of the chef’s knife will traverse a fairly straight line as it goes through the watermelon.
- If you are slicing an extra big watermelon, the blade may not go through the fruit with one sift motion. If this is the case, spin the watermelon around so you can cut through the other half. Do what you did the first time. Steady the watermelon and then plunge the blade at the top, following the first cut’s position that you mad. Don’t saw through the fruit. Let the sharp edge of the knife worth through the rind. Apply pressure in a downward manner to quickly break the split the thick rind.
- Grab a spoon and remove as much of the seeds of the watermelon if you wish. If you purchased a seedless variety of watermelon, skip this step.
- Take one half of the watermelon and begin slicing wedges off of it. For best results, slice off the wedges in an equidistance manner from the center of the half. Make sure that you lop off half of the first half to cut off wedges more easily.
- Watermelons can be served as small wedges. If you need smaller cubes, you can slice across the small wedges and lop off the larger cubes as you produce them. Continue working on all of the wedges until all of the watermelons have been sliced to perfection. If you want to dice your watermelons, follow the instructions below.
How do you dice a watermelon?
Dicing a watermelon may sound something from a professional chef’s roster of skills, but in reality, anyone can do it if they know the right technique. Assuming that you have already broken into the fruit, get a large quarter of the watermelon and cut it from end to end.
This will provide you with parallel straight slices of fruit. Slice the fruit once again across to make the cubes with the sliced watermelon. Continue cutting until the half that you are holding is completely cubed. Slice from one end to free the cubes of watermelon from the skin.
This technique is just crosshatching the watermelon to produce cubes with consistent sizes. If you cut the fruit’s flesh well enough, a single glide of your chef’s knife should easily free the rest of the fruit from the thick rind.
You can experiment with different sizes of cubes when you dice your watermelon. And should you need even smaller pieces, you can always slice through the cubes that you have free from the rind manually. After slicing, drain the fruit a little with a colander and proceed with arranging the diced fruits on the serving tray and other fruits in your selection.
Can I cut special shapes with watermelon?
Yes, you can! You can create custom shapes. Slice off flat sections off of the fruit. After cutting the watermelon in half, you can get these flatter, dish-sized portions. Use cookie cutter molds to obtain the custom shapes that you want. Be creative – you can use a variety of cookie cutter shapes to create the best-looking morsels of watermelon.
