Sprenzy Shopping Blog

I love eating fruit but I hate peeling it. I tend to stick to simple to eat fruit, such as grapes, cherries and nectarines. Peeling a banana is as much peeling as I’ll do.

The problem is… I enjoy melons, kiwis, jack fruit and especially mangos. I have always been fortunate with someone in my life (mom, aunt, girlfriend, etc.) who doesn’t mind peeling fruit for me. Some folks say that I have been spoiled all my life with a bounty of freshly cut fruit. I won’t deny it.

To change the spoiled perception, I recently bought an OXO Good Grips Mango Splitter to cut mangos on my own. On the rare occasions when I’ve peeled and cut a mango, I have always left too much fruit on the seed and skin. As a kid, I enjoyed eating the fruit off the seed but these days I have to floss immediately afterwards to get the fibrous strands out of my teeth.

I’ve used the OXO mango splitter several times and it works perfectly to remove the seed and split the mango in half. I still had to score the halved mangos and cut the fruit from the skin. However, using the mango splitter and removing the fruit from the skin is easier and faster than doing it the traditional way… for me at least.

For the OXO mango splitter to work well, here are two tips…

1. Don’t buy extra large mangos - small to medium sized mango seeds are easily removed by the splitter. Larger mangos have big seeds that won’t pass through the splitter and will dull the blade. I was able to de-seed a very large mango but it required a lot of force to cut through the seed and the halved mango had seed chunks. It’s definitely not a recommended practice.
   
2. Forget the over-ripe mango - using the mango splitter on an over-ripe fruit will remove the seed but you’ll be juicing the mango too. Avoid the mess and stick to ripe but relatively firm mangos.

I’ve only tested the OXO Mango Splitter on the mango variety that’s widely available in the U.S. I believe it’s the Tommy Atkins variety. I don’t think the splitter is useful on a Manila mango because it’s a smaller fruit with a small seed. But I’ll test it out and report the results on the Manila mango.

I usually prefer multi-taskers to specialized kitchen tools, but I’m trying to overcome my anti-peeling fruit stigma. If you have room in your kitchen for another tool, I definitely recommend the OXO Mango Splitter. It maybe hard to believe for some of my friends, but they might get freshly cut mango the next time they come over.