The whole point of Tiki Month is learning things you’ve never tried before to better enjoy the faux-Polynesian experience. Most of the time for me, it is recipes. It could be decorating, dressing, or just grooving. But there are also the oddball skills.

For instance, I used to like to serve mango chunks with my drinks, because they are Tiki-appropriate, and because they are delicious. Also, there are several interesting drinks that call for mango puree, nectar, or syrup. But as good as mangoes are, I avoid them the rest of the year because they are such a giant pain in the butt to transform from attractive fruit to usable chunks.

If you haven’t fought this fight (and earned the scars), mangoes are a particularly difficult to work with fruit. They have a gigantic, fibrous pit which is very attached to the surrounding flesh. It is also almond shaped and you can get only a general idea of how it is aligned inside the mango by external inspection. The end result is lots of blind cutting into a slippery object. Your efforts will often be wasteful, and occasionally dangerous. OXO has a purpose-made Mango Splitter, but this beast is bulky and the definition of a unitasker. So, what is the guy who needs some yummy tropical fruit to do?

Enter my culinary hero, and my daughters’ role model and general sex-symbol, Alton Brown, with a fool-resistant method:

The video, as is typical for the master, simultaneously hilarious and very useful. I’ve tried the method. It works like a peach.

Get it?
See what Doug did there?
See, a peach has a pit, too. But it’s really easy to remove a peach pit, and….
You people are hopeless.

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