The Watermelon Trilogy

'Tis the season -- for watermelon, that is.  And because I love watermelon, we're going to have an extravaganza of three videos on cutting the suckers.  I posted this originally in 2023, so it's time to bring it back.

(None of these are exactly the way I cut them, since I tend to buy the smaller, round, seedless "personal" watermelons.  But the last two videos are pretty close.)

First though, we'll start with one of the those "50 People Try to..." videos from Epicurious.com.  Not shockingly, what these people are flailingly trying to do is cut a watermelon.  The fun of the video aside, this is the best instruction at the end for how to cut a watermelon in wedges.

​This next video is short, only about a minute, and comes from The Racheal Ray Show.  It's close to how I've been cutting my watermelons, though with a couple of slight differences. 

The first is that they're using a bigger watermelon that I use, but it's still basically round, like mine.  The other is that her Senior Culinary Producer is showing how to cut spears, and I like cubes.  So, I just easily slice the rinds off the ends and then easily cut the spears in to cubes.

Finally, this third video is a new way I've learned, and definitely weird on the surface, but I've been trying lately with reasonable success.  I'm not sure if it's faster or better than my "lattice" version above, but it may be, and it's fun.  It comes from Alton Brown.  This is for a regular watermelon, but works just as well with one of my round fellows.  And it uses...a cheese slicer!  (Hey, I told you it was weird.) 

However, after the video, I have an update about this from when I first wrote about it
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And then I turn each wheel into cubes by making cross-lattice cuts.  I haven't mastered a smooth move with the cheese slicer, but I'm getting better.  And if I leave too much watermelon on the rind -- that's fine, I just snack on it while continuing with the cutting.

My update is that, although I like this method because it's sort of fun (and works), my skillset isn't at the level of Alton Brown, and I haven't yet mastered the ability to get nice, smooth edges.  And what I discovered as a workaround is that I could still use this basic method but instead just use a basic paring knife.  It's perhaps a touch slower (and not as fun), but worked really well.

That said, if you want to try the last method and use a cheese slicer, but don't have one, this is the model I got here from Amazon.  It's currently being sold for $10, which is 55% off its regular price -- and even down $2 from what I wrote about this last time.  It has 4.3 stars out of 5, and I like it because the screws on the side make it easy to remove the guide bar (which is necessary to take off, in order to use for slicing off the watermelon rinds.)