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Kiwi fruit. Strange little fruit.
It's really tart, and it has to be called kiwi fruit, can't call it kiwi because
kiwi is a bird or a person. We're going to talk about this fruit today
and show you how important it is. It is one of the very few fruits that has
Vitamin K in it, which is kind of interesting, but it has high amounts of
Vitamin C and high amounts of B6. Excellent fruit for us.
Now besides raw, what we can also get, is we can get it into juices.
And this is kiwi-raspberry juice. You probably will not find kiwi juice by
itself, it's pretty tart. And then we can also find it in the frozen
food section mixed with other fruits, this one is apple-kiwi-strawberry juice.
Ooh, is that good. So that's the main way you can buy
kiwi fruit without it being fresh fruit.
But the fresh fruit is just totally divine to eat.
So let's talk about what you look like,
look for, when you're looking at the kiwi fruit.
First you put it in your palm of your hand like that and you kind of just squeeze it
gently, kind of like an avocado, you want to be sure that it gives a little.
This one is not ripe, it doesn't give at all.
And that's mostly what's on this plate is the non-ripe and this is the way I usually
like to buy them, and I like to keep them on the shelf, and here in the room
temperature, but if I wanted them to ripen really fast, I can put them into a brown
paper bag and watch them.
And if I wanted to speed up the ripening process even further, you can stick an
apple or a banana in there and that will help them ripen.
So you just stick it all in there together and kind of seal it up and don't
forget about 'em, cause they're going to keep ripening in there even if you don't
look and one day it's going to be squishy. But that's a really nice way to do it and
I buy them kind of in different stages when I buy them, because I really like
them and usually they'll be on sale and then you buy a bunch and then they won't
be on sale. And today they were on sale.
So these are the ones that aren't ripe and you'll notice what that is.
It is smooth, you see the skin, there's no wrinkles in the skin.
And when I bring this up to my nose, I can smell and there's not a lot of smell
and you need to have some smell or it won't taste good.
So let's look at the other one, now these are ripe.
See how the skin is starting to wrinkle? But it's still you can tell is attached to
the meat that's inside. And when I put this in my hand, it does
give, it's not hard at all. So these are the ones that need to be
eaten now. Now, if you see one that's kind of
wrinkly and you see how wrinkled this is, and it's pulling away from the fruit, and
it is quite soft, this may be past ripe. So you have to decide if you want to eat
this one or not and when you open it up, it may not be as tasty as the other ones
are that aren't quite so wrinkly yet. And when you smell these, nope, wrong end,
now that smells like a kiwi fruit. And after you have it once you'll know
what that smell is you're looking for. So let's open one of these up and I'll
show you what's inside.
Very seldom you cannot freeze kiwis unless they're in another juice.
That's the reason why that's done.
So I'm cutting off this little pointy end, this was the blossom end of it, I mean
that was the stem end of it, and this end, the blossom end, has a hard piece inside.
And if you'll notice you can see that this white, and that's rather hard, so you kind
of have to take a little divot out, you see how I've done that?
It's kind of a curve, because you want to cut that out.
And then to peel it, you just go down the sides and take it off.
There's not much peel on here, it's very thin.
You just want to take it off until you get to the end.
And now I'm going to show you a way. Now you want to slice it and the slicing
reveals all the seeds and there's lots of seed in here.
I think that kiwi is one of the most beautiful fruits that you can have.
Now when you're trying to figure out what you want to use these for, you can use
them with milk products on them, if you're going to use it right away, but if
they're going to sit in the milk products, the chemicals in here will start
digesting the milk proteins and it will not taste very good after that.
So you don't want to put milk on until it's just time for serving.
The other thing if you want to use it in gelatin like making jello with this in it,
you need to cook it first, heat it up, because if you don't, the chemicals in
here will eat up the collagen that's in the gelatin and that will end up being a
mushy mess. Most people just eat them plain.
I want to show you an easy way to slice up the kiwi.
You can't do it until it's ripe, if it's hard it won't work, but if it isn't, this
is the coolest way, use your egg slicer. Just stick it in there one way or the
other, whichever way you want to cut it. I want mine to be little circles, so I
just push it through, then I pick it up, and let me show you how beautiful that is,
perfectly cut. And then if you can see, the little black
things are all the seeds and when you eat it, it does give you the little crunch
inside and it adds a really nice texture. And then the middle down after you cut off
the very end, that's quite soft. And the more ripe it is, the softer it is.
In addition to eating kiwi fruit raw, or as a snack, or just as it is, you can add
it to salads, whether it's a vegetable salad or a fruit salad.
A great color addition. You can also put it on your cereal in the
morning and that's a great way to have your Vitamin C with your breakfast.
And then you can also add them to summer drinks especially for a bright spot of
color, and it goes really well with strawberries.
Okay, so that's the kiwi. Now when you're doing the...if you wanted to use the kiwi
to take to lunch or your kids, it's really hard for them to peel them.
But they will not turn brown, these are so
acid they don't turn brown. So you can slice them like this or we can
just cut them into chunks. So we're going to do that now, we're going
to cut out the top, and cut off the bottom, and I'm going to peel it,
and for the kids to take to school or even for your own lunch, you know that's a
great time to have the kids eat things that are something that's not so popular
because it's cut into pieces and kids will put things in their mouths if they are cut
well for them. So I would just cut this off, and because
it's hard to chew this because it is so juicy, look at that, you can just see how
wet it is, you don't want to just give 'em the whole thing, it's hard to eat.
So cut it into quarters and I cut them into long quarters.
Ooh, I almost dropped that for sure! So I just cut down the middle, and then
cut the other way and then that gives them the slices and you can just put this into
the little plastic snack bags and send it to them in lunches.
Kiwi is an exciting fruit. I want you to go to my website, I've got
some much more information about kiwi fruit and I also have some ideas about how
to top it if you wanted to make it in a dessert kind of thing and not just put it
in a salad.
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