14 Peeling Hacks That Will Make Your Time In The Kitchen A Breeze
Creating delicious meals requires both artistry and skill. It also requires patience and humility to learn how to improve constantly and pick up new, handy tricks that help produce a better meal. While much of this growth focuses on cooking and picking quality ingredients, we know that the preparation process is just as important as learning different cooking methods.
We love a device that helps us create a perfectly peeled fruit or veggie, but we treasure a simple trick that you can easily add to your culinary toolbox even more. You'll learn that while tricks are a dime a dozen, some are certainly more successful than others. Our advice is to find the best methods for you and fine-tune them as much as possible. Preparation doesn't need to feel like a chore, and with your favorite methods, it won't. Learning quality, effective peeling hacks will make your time in the kitchen an absolute breeze.
Potato peeling doesn't require a special tool
When you're preparing mashed potatoes or potato salad, one of the first steps you'll follow is peeling a bowl of potatoes. This process can feel lengthy and boring, and with a peeler, it can even be a little dangerous if you allow your mind to wander during the process. Consider going about it differently to save yourself a bit of time and even preserve your fingertips.
For a potato peeling hack you'll wish you had known sooner, simply score your potatoes with lines all around them. Then put your potatoes in a pot to boil with the skins on and allow them to cook until they are knife tender and soft. Then, transfer those cooked potatoes into an ice bath to stop the cooking and cool them down. Once they feel cooled down, you'll find that you can peel the skin right off the potato.
While this may seem entirely counter to the way you've learned, a Reddit user recommends this method because it makes the skin easier to work with after the hot and cold water shocks the potato skins.
Forks help you peel and devein shrimp
Shrimp is an excellent ingredient in pastas and other tasty meals. It is also a perfect appetizer, especially when paired with tangy and delightful cocktail sauce. Whether in a cocktail glass or arranged on a plate, bringing a shrimp cocktail as your dish to share may very well make you the favorite guest.
Many people get scared away from shrimp because they don't know how to peel and devein it easily and efficiently. Thankfully, peeling shrimp with this simple hack will show you just what you've been missing your whole life. The best news: you only need a fork to take off the shell and those little legs in one go. Simply slide that fork under the shell and pull it back and up. If you get the hang of this, you'll also be able to devein the shrimp. Please bear in mind that you don't really need to devein shrimp, and it is more of a personal and cosmetic preference than anything else. That dark vein won't actually hurt you, even if it makes you feel a little squirmy.
Ovens make peeling beets easier
Beets are a divisive food. The Dwight Schrutes of the world may have something of a beet obsession, but to many, they taste far too earthy. However, if you're committed to the nutritional value a beet offers or even curious about how you can sneak them into your diet, it will be helpful to know how to peel it.
On the surface, they seem a little difficult, but there is an oven hack that makes peeling beats easy. Many people will choose to boil their beets before peeling them, but the oven makes this process even easier. To use your oven in your process, set it to heat at 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Then, wrap each of your beets in foil and place them in the preheated oven for roughly an hour. After that hour, allow those beets to cool and cut off each beet's rough end. After removing those ends, you'll see that the beet peels nearly slip right off, and you don't even need to worry about beet-stained hands.
Take out your power drill to peel apples
Apples offer such flexibility. Great in salads, cakes, pies, and even on their own, there are just so many different ways to enjoy this fruit. Plus, according to the old adage, they should keep the doctor away! No matter how you enjoy an apple, you'll often need to begin by peeling it, and like peeling potatoes, this one is quite a tedious pain.
However, this bizarre hack peels an apple in 3 seconds. For this one, you'll need an odd tool: your drill and a peeler. Use a sharp drill bit to attach your drill to the bottom of your apple. Then, turn on the drill and put the peeler on the apple. Start at a moderate speed and work your way up to a quicker pace. Be sure you do this over your sink with a garbage disposal or over your garbage bin. After a little practice, you may even take the peel off in one long strand. If you're making an apple pie, you'll have plenty of apples to practice on. Even as you start learning how to peel in this way and begin slowly, it will still move quicker than peeling by hand.
Drop eggs in boiling water for quick peeling
While peeled shrimp makes a great appetizer, so do deviled eggs. The only problem with deviled eggs is that the preparation requires you to peel a whole bunch of eggs, and this process can be obnoxious if you don't know an excellent way to do it. Thankfully, peeling eggs just got so much easier, thanks to this simple trick.
To take advantage, though, you'll need to change how you hard boil eggs. You may have learned that you should put the eggs in cold water and let them heat as the water begins to boil. However, a simple change in this process will help you tenfold when it comes time to peel. By simply getting the water to a boil and then adding in your eggs when the water is already boiling, you'll end up with eggs that are much simpler to peel. After you take the eggs out of the water, allow them to rest and cool until they are easy for you to handle and not warm at all. We recommend taking them out of the boiling water and putting them in an ice bath. Roughly 15 minutes in that ice water should do the trick, and your peels will come off much quicker.
Use this staple ingredient to speed up egg peeling
You can do more to simplify the dreaded hard-boiled egg peeling process. For this hack, you only need one key ingredient: baking soda. We love an easy trick, and this one couldn't be simpler. When prepping your pot to boil your eggs, add half a teaspoon of the sodium bicarbonate to each quart of water you will be heating up. Then, once the eggs finish cooking, peel them like you normally would. The baking soda should help the shells come off with ease.
The baking soda increases the eggs' pH level, which, in turn, substantially weakens the bonds between the shell and the interior. As a result, peeling the egg becomes much easier, and you will have fewer egg whites sticking to that problematic surface. Simplify this process even more by putting the cooked eggs straight into a cool ice bath.
Microwave butternut squash
Butternut squash is a great ingredient for pie, as a side, or as a tasty, warming soup. Even though these dishes are fabulous, chances are that you aren't thrilled about preparing that butternut squash. The idea of going after one of these with a peeler or knife may seem overwhelming and even wasteful.
Instead of losing all that butternut squash goodness thanks to peeling one with just a knife, use a microwave to assist in peeling your butternut squash. Begin by piercing the thick skin of your squash over and over with a fork, then take off the ends of your squash. Place your squash on a microwave-safe plate, set your microwave for three-and-a-half minutes, and wait patiently nearby. Once the time ends, wait until you can handle it and it cools for a time. Then once your squash is ready, that peel should come away from the squash easily. After removing this hard exterior, you can cook the squash in whatever way you need to. This short amount of time in the microwave should not cook the flesh inside your butternut squash; it will only loosen that peel.
Spoons help you peel ginger
If you've been to a sushi restaurant, you may be familiar with the delicious taste of ginger. It is also a delightful flavor for baked goods, soups, and Moscow mules. And while we love each of these, we certainly know the root skin on ginger is nothing but a pain. Thankfully, there's an easy solution to this one.
Rather than reaching for your peeler or knife, peel your ginger with a spoon. Since the skin of a ginger root is remarkably thin, it comes right off when you use the tip or rounded edge of your spoon to scrape the ginger in one direction. You'll find that a spoon gives you much more control than a peeler may, and since ginger is on the smaller side, more control is definitely a bonus. Not to mention you could easily hurt yourself using a peeler in this way. After removing the skin, you'll be left with plenty of ginger to slice, mince, or muddle to your heart's content.
Orange peeling is also simplified with a spoon
One of the most challenging fruits to peel is the orange. Sweet and just perfectly tart, oranges have quite the rind with which to battle and remove to reveal the fabulous treat inside. You can certainly get special tools and knives to aid in your peeling, but you might be happy to learn that there's an even simpler method that could help.
For this simple orange peeling method you must try, use a sharp knife to score the outside of your orange all the way around. Do not actually cut through the rind — just be sure it has been thoroughly scored. Then take your spoon and with the tip of the handle, press it into the orange scored area and separate the rind from the flesh of the fruit. Do this to both sides of the orange so that you have a thoroughly peeled orange. This method will leave your hands free of stickiness.
Slice the end off and use a spoon to peel a kiwi
Perhaps no fruit debate rages as hotly as the question of whether you should eat the skin of a kiwi. That brown, fuzzy skin is actually slightly tart, adding a bit of a different taste to this already delicious fruit. Some people enjoy biting straight into a kiwi as though it were an apple, but if you would prefer to have that brown skin removed, you should know there using a spoon may be the easiest way to remove the skin.
In order for this spoon method to work, you'll need to remove one of the ends of the kiwi. From there, you can run the spoon along the outside of the kiwi, slicing it into the skin and removing the skin from the fruit itself. It should look as though your spoon is, more or less, hugging the fruit. The kiwi can then be cut in whatever method you choose. We should note that you'll want to be sure that you have a ripe, and perhaps slightly squishy, fruit in order for this simple fruit-peeling method to work the way it should.
Sharp knives help when it comes to peeling pineapple
When grocery shopping, you learn the tricks for choosing perfectly ripened fruits and vegetables. When it comes to choosing the perfect pineapple, you shouldn't rely solely on color when picking one out. Instead, be sure also to give it a good sniff. If the pineapple is starting to smell sweet, it's time to bring it home to cut it. And when it comes to learning how to cut a pineapple, there are several tricks that will help you.
First thing first: Be sure you have a sharp knife. You'll use that knife to cut off the top and bottom, then use it along the pineapple in smooth movements length-wise, roughly half an inch away from the pineapple's prickly peel. Be sure you are going in something of a curved manner. After removing the peel, you can either use a pineapple corer to remove that hard middle area or cut the pineapple into rings and then remove the hard inner part from each. If you'd like your pineapple to be chunks, you can also stack the rings on top of one another and run a knife through the stack to cut them into pieces.
Paring knives help you open a pomegranate
When it comes to pomegranates, if you know little else, you probably know two things: The seeds are delicious and healthful, and the fruit is rather a pain to open. We've tried many methods to open these tasty fruits, including everything from peeling them in water to giving them a good whack on the bottom of the fruit with a wooden spoon. However, David Tanis' method on how to open a pomegranate is much simpler.
Tanis recommends using a paring knife to open a pomegranate. First, you'll cut the top of the pomegranate off. This will allow you to see the white areas that hold all of the tasty seeds. From this top opening, make small cuts all around the top of the fruit. Then carefully pull apart the fruit and gently take out the bright seeds from their white holdings. You'll need to pluck out the little white parts as you put seeds in a bowl or container, but it'll be much simpler than you think.
Make quick work of mango peeling with a water glass
With some fruits, it's abundantly obvious how they should be eaten or prepared. Mangoes, alas, do not fall into that category. Peeling one with a handheld peeler could take an eternity, considering how robust the peel is, and that core in the middle makes slicing a little more difficult. You certainly would need a sharp knife to do it. Thankfully, a humble glass is an unexpected item you can use to easily peel your mangoes.
Begin by slicing your mango in half, avoiding the pit as much as possible. Then, for the real magic, run your glass over the mango by using the top of the glass to separate the flesh of the mango from the peel. This will easily remove that whole peel and give you a fleshy mango piece to cut however you would like. Personally, we like chopping a mango and using it in salsa or even to liven up our favorite fruit salad. No matter how you decide to enjoy your mango, though, this simple peeling process should certainly help in your preparation.
Soak garlic overnight for easy peeling
Garlic is one of those scents you know immediately. Raw, roasted, and baked, garlic can take many savory dishes to new levels. Unfortunately, the peeling of garlic is undoubtedly tricky. Some people turn to shaking garlic in a jar, but this can be pretty loud. Others like crushing garlic under a large knife, but this has the potential of altering how your garlic looks in the final dish. We have a simper recommendation, with a simple trick restaurants use to peel garlic instantly. This trick will not only peel your garlic but also keep it looking and tasting perfect.
Chef Nicholas Poulmentis recommends placing your garlic in water overnight. This soak will require you to plan ahead for your meals, but having it readily available in water and nearly falling from its peel will be convenient, especially if you are preparing a large meal with multiple dishes that require garlic as an ingredient. Choosing to place garlic in warm water instead of cold or room temperature water can significantly speed up this process and make the garlic ready for you in 30 minutes or less.