The Slicing Hack You Need For Easy Watermelon Skewers

How do you eat your watermelon? The question is a bit like asking how you eat your Oreos — there's no right or wrong way to devour either — in watermelon's case, sticks, cubes, and triangles all get the job done — but people have strongly held hot takes on the topic. If you've always been in, for example, team slice or team "scoop it right out of the rind with a spoon over the sink," no judgment, but there's a new way to watermelon that's so good you may never look back.

When serving up fresh melon at a cookout, pool party, or summer dinner party, no one wants to have to put their hands all over pieces to grab their portion, and triangular slices can slide around on the plate and take up too much room. Skip the laborious melon balling or cutting perfect triangles. The neatest, most convenient way to serve up this otherwise unwieldy fruit is on a skewer. 

Instead of tediously slicing each shape out and spearing the chunks onto a skewer one by one, there's a genius hack for seamlessly creating a whole bouquet of skewers all at once. By using the cooking utensils as a kind of blueprint, you can quickly carve up a watermelon so that you're left with a pile of skewered sweet fruit that is instantly servable.

Hands-free, tidy, and with no bulky rind left to dispose of, this way of serving watermelon is perfect whether on a dinner plate or handed out to the kids. As specialty food service brand Melissa's Produce demonstrated on TikTok, the trick to mastering this easy way to serve everyone's favorite summer fruit is in how you start. Take a whole melon — picking the best one from the grocery store, of course — and slice it in half long ways, placing the flesh side down so that the rounded rind side is upwards and ready to be pricked with skewers. If you don't have any handy, popsicle sticks work too (and might be safer if serving a younger crowd that shouldn't be trusted with sharp ends). 

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How to slice a watermelon to make skewers‼️‼️😱😱🍉🍉🍉

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Then, insert the stick at regularly spaced intervals into the rind, placing them in a grid shape. Space them too close together and your resulting spears will be super slim, but put too few and they'll be more jumbo wedges than spears, so space for the serving size you want. When all skewers have been firmly stuck through, slice downward with a sharp large knife, horizontally and then vertically, carving out squares around each skewer. When you've sliced through the last section, the ready-to-serve skewers should fall to the cutting board. Your fruity dessert or snack is ready to be enjoyed as is or with a spritz of lemon juice or salt for some extra pizazz.