The folks at POM Wonderful generously sent us some pomegranate juice for us to review along with some literature about the health benefits of pomegranate juice. If you like cranberry juice, you’ll definitely enjoy pomegranate juice. It has the same sort of astringent berry kind of flavor, but unlike cranberry juice, you don’t have to add tons of sugar to make the stuff palatable. I like it straight out of the bottle. Strangely, they also sell supplements, POM Wonderful’s 90ct Pomx Pills – Natural Pomegranate Antioxidant Supplement (1000mg).

First we decided to make a Pomegranate Lamb Kabob dish from the POM Wonderful website (unfortunately, the recipe is gone from their site). The recipe is easy as pie. Basically, you take kabob-sized chunks of lamb, pomegranate syrup, garlic, lemon juice, salt, and pepper, and let them marinate for at least eight hours. Because of a scheduling mistake, we left the lamb to marinate for two days! Two days!

To make your pomegranate juice into syrup, you combine 1 cup of pomegranate juice with 3/4 cup sugar, bring it to a boil, and them simmer it down until it loses about half of its volume (about 20 minutes.) I actually decided that was too much sugar and doubled the juice. Despite my amendment, the syrup still ended up really sweet.

Here’s what our marinade ended up looking like before shaking.

And here are the finished kabobs. Mmmmmmm. One thing I have to mention about this recipe is that they say to leave your lamb kabobs on the grill for 10-15 minutes, which is only advisable if you want to turn your lamb into charcoal. That’s way too much time. Especially for something covered with sugary syrup. Mine were ready to go in five minutes. We did it up fancy and ate these with corn and artichokes.

A couple days later we also tried salmon in the same marinade. While we enjoyed both the dishes, I have to say that we were surprised to find that the salmon was better than the lamb. We also found that you can’t be shy with the pomegranate syrup when you’re cooking. You should put a lot of it on, because somehow the flavor got lost with the lamb and the salmon both. I also went crazy and tried the pomegranate syrup with tahini sauce on a hunk of leftover Trader Joe’s buffalo burger on a bed of Polenta. The pomegranate syrup and tahini was a killer combo and I think further investigation is warranted. However, while it was nice on the Polenta, it didn’t go so hot with the buffalo burger.

Our number one favorite thing to do with the POM Wonderful Pomegranate Juice was to add it to our homemade limeade. That is simply heaven.

What more can we say about pomegranate juice? We’re planning on making ourselves some pomegranate Cosmos sometime soon. No doubt they will be awesome. We both really loved cooking with (and drinking) the pomegranate juice and would like to thank the folks at POM Wonderful again for sending it our way.

We want to know: Have you tried POM Wonderful Pomegranate Juice? We’d love to hear about your cooking adventures with it. Let us know in the comments!

Times we have visited: 3 (So we feel good about our rating.)
Overall rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Price compared to “regular”: Same