Confession time: I’ve had the worst luck this year with watermelons. We’ve had a hot, rainy summer here in Birmingham, which is perfect for growing watermelons. And I’ve heard that there are plenty of great ones about. Neighbors and friends have been literally gushing about how good the melons are this year. I’ve been dreaming of all the ways I want to eat a watermelon.
But every single one I’ve brought home has been either disappointing, or downright awful. Here it is, prime watermelon season, and I’ve hardly had a one that wasn’t mealy, mild, or otherwise disappointing.
After several supermarket fails, I even drove over to the farmers‘ market one Saturday morning. I found the tent with the longest line, and asked them to pick me a good one.
It was two and a half feet long, football-shaped, and so ripe that, after I brought it home, it actually started leaking through the rind onto the counter.
I cut it right open, and it was all mush inside. I had to throw it away.
Some Methods for Picking Watermelons That Don’t Work
Most of the methods I’ve picked up on what you might call watermelon-dowsing feel more like art than science.
I’ve heard you’re supposed to pick ones that smell sweet. Maybe my nose isn’t sensitive enough, or maybe it’s something about the air in a supermarket all watermelons tend to smell more or less the same until I cut them open. So that’s never worked.
I’ve also heard you’re supposed to tap or knock on them and choose one with a hollow sound. I’ve spent several hours of my life over the years rapping my knuckles against melons in the supermarket like some kind of crazy watermelon elf trying to find the secret door home. They all just sound the same to me.
I had to know what I was doing wrong. So I started doing some digging. And that’s when I found a pretty genius tip from The Kitchn, that I hadn’t heard before: the two finger rule.
What Is the Two Finger Rule for Picking Ripe Watermelons?
The two finger rule is a quick way to tell if your watermelon is really ripe. You simply lay your two (adult) fingers over the dark area on a striped watermelon, and if the stripe is at least big enough to contain your fingers, it’s probably ripe!
I armed myself with this—and a couple other tips (more below) and I went shopping with hope in my heart.
Checking watermelons with the two-finger rule is a lot easier than rapping on the rinds or sniffing for scents. It’s a quick visual that tells you immediately if it’s ready to keep or if it needs to be tossed back.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that the size of the watermelon didn’t always correspond to the size of the stripes, either. There were big watermelons with narrower stripes, and there were smaller watermelons with wider stripes. So this wasn’t just code for „find a big one.“
But I wanted to really reduce my chances of yet another failure. So I also checked up on several other ripe-watermelon-finding methods.
Other Ways to Tell If a Watermelon Is Sweet or Ripe
I ended up finding four more easy-to-try methods of telling if a watermelon is ripe, besides the two-finger method. Most of the authoritative sources out there (including The National Watermelon Promotion Board and the University of Georgia’s extension service) include at least a couple of these.
They are:
Round watermelons are sweeter and less watery.
Darker, yellower „field spots“ indicate more flavor than lighter, whiter field spots.
A larger section of hatches (or webbing) indicates more sweetness.
Shinier watermelons are less ripe. Choose darker, duller ones instead.
Combined with the two finger rule, this gave me a lot of ways to make a safer watermelon bet.
Obviously, the easiest way to tell would be to cut it open, but since I didn’t think I could just start slicing watermelons open at the store without making a lot of folks mad, I decided to give these a try and see if they would help change my luck.
How to Pick a Watermelon at the Grocery Store
After looking over the selection, I decided on the watermelon pictured above. It fit the two-finger rule. It was not as shiny as some of the others. And while its field spot wasn’t the yellowest, it had a lot of hatching on it.
Most importantly to me, it was round. I’d been buying the longer, football-shaped melons all season, and I think that was a big part of the problem.
After bringing it home, I sliced it open:
And voila! This was a very ripe, very sweet watermelon. It was sweet and juicy, and very ripe, with lots of flavor. Here’s a photo of my happy teenager enjoying a wedge:
So, How Do You Pick a Good Watermelon?
Following the guidelines above helped me pick a ripe watermelon, but will they work every time? Having only tested this the once, it’s too soon to say. But using these methods, I found a very delicious watermelon on my first try, after months of failure, and it didn’t take much time or effort to do so. So I’m going with these from now on.