How to Stop Serving Soggy Watermelon

Serious Eats

Say goodbye to watermelon soup and hello to crisp, flavorful fruit with this simple maceration trick! Lightly coat watermelon chunks with just a teaspoon of sugar per 4 cups, then let them chill in a colander over a bowl in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Transcript

00:00As professional food stylists, there are few things that annoy me more than being on set

00:04and watching my food die. While they might be tasty when they're juicy, too much juice with

00:08watermelons leads to a very watery salad and a real mess on the plate. One way to deal with that?

00:14Maceration. Maceration works with both salt and sugar by breaking down the cell membranes,

00:19drawing out the water. Think of salt as a power tool. Gets the job done quickly,

00:23but it can be a little too strong in more delicate things like watermelon. Sugar is

00:27more like a finishing sander. Precise, you're concentrating flavors, and setting your food up

00:31to succeed in the salad. So we're making the Serious Eats watermelon feta and mint salad.

00:35Here are our two salads next to each other. This is the one we macerated. You can see right here,

00:40there's no liquid pooling at all. Now this is the one. Look at all of that extra liquid that's now

00:45just pouring out. I would have to replate this dish before I could take a picture of it. As opposed to

00:50this, we can go straight into photo. Fun fact, you can macerate it with tequila, too.

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