Cutting & Peeling Food

Fresh ginger is a staple in my kitchen. It is an extremely versatile ingredient that shows up in any course, from savory to sweet, be it main, beverage, dessert, or salad. It can even be medicine — hot ginger tea with lemon, honey and brandy will cure what ails you! In short, fresh ginger is essential to my cooking. Read on for my methods for peeling and mincing fresh ginger.

You’ve probably heard dozens of old wives’ tales and pseudo-scientific advice for cutting onions without tears. Two of the most ludicrous are holding burning matches in your mouth while you chop, a fire hazard to say the least, and chewing on a raw onion, which merely adds more onion close to your mucus membranes. Most of these homespun ideas just aren’t very effective, but we’ve got five tips which are.

Ready to become a pro at cooking pork?

Whether you're using a Roma tomato, supermarket staple, or heirloom variety, learning how to dice a tomato properly is key to making salads, salsas, and much more. Get expert tips in this step-by-step visual guide.

"Perfect slices every time."

Plus you'll be able to serve more cake and cut down on waste!

Spoiler alert: It won't stop your tears.

Have you spent most of your life peeling carrots before cooking or eating them just because that’s what you’ve seen other people do, so you followed suit? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. When it comes down to it, you don’t ever really have to peel carrots. As long as you wash and scrub them well to remove dirt and any debris (this natural fruit and veggie wash is a good start!), unpeeled carrots are perfectly safe (and delicious) to eat.

If you watch food competition shows, you’ll probably see a competitor or chef expertly running their knives over that steel tool pictured above. In fact, you might even own one of those steels if you have a big knife set or knife block. So do you know what that tool is? It sharpens knives, right? But here’s where you’re wrong: That tool, no matter what it is labeled, is decidedly not a sharpening steel. The tool many think of as a sharpening steel is actually a honing steel.

A new method faced off against Kitchn's go-to method.

No more clingy pits.

No need to worry about the seeds spilling everywhere!

Our step-by-step photo guide will show you the way.

Summer suddenly just got a whole lot cooler.

Follow these steps to get a peach pie in the oven ASAP!

Get ready for silky-smooth tomato sauce.

It's way easier than it might seem.

No fancy tools required!

The possibilities are endless when it comes to zucchini!

Don't be late to the party!

You'll be making delicious zucchini bread all summer long!

It was also the simplest.

You'll have delicious peach pies and cobblers on the table in no time!

Follow these simple steps to slice your fresh papaya.

There are four easy ways to do it!

"If you need to make a lot of eggs at once this is a simpler method and you’ll only end up with one dish to wash."

This makes it so much easier.

The one magic number to rule them all.

This method makes so much sense.

This makes prepping salads so much easier.

Let’s talk about fresh herbs. They smell great, they make our food taste incredible, and they are a pain in the you-know-what to get off the stem. If you try to tell me you actually enjoy picking off each tiny leaf, methodically working your way to a full tablespoon, I’m going to call shenanigans. Yes, fresh herbs make us work for our reward — no way around it. At the very least, we should be sure we’re stripping and mincing our herbs in the most efficient way possible.

If you’ve been seeding your tomatoes before using them in your cooking, we have news for you: maybe you should stop. Or so says America’s Test Kitchen host Chris Kimball in his new book on the science of cooking. So what’s wrong with seeding tomatoes?

We eat a lot of avocados in our house. And if we’re making guacamole or avocado toast, the means by which we remove the flesh from the shell matters very little. But if we want clean, uniform chunks, this is our go-to method. It’s so much easier than “make a grid pattern and then pop out the pieces” (which never worked for us anyway).

As we dive into some fresh tutorials and videos for How To Month we’d like to first direct your attention to a few tutorials from our archives. These 10 tutorials are all on everyone’s most-requested topic: Knife skills!There are some basics here; we especially recommend the video on basic knife skills, which covers how to set up your cutting board, and how to hold your knife. Also, The Claw! makes an appearance.

We just read a tip at Saveur’s website and learned something new. No, not about separating an egg in your hands, although that’s a good one, too. There’s something else…Saveur claims eggs will separate more easily when they are cold, not room temperature. We occasionally do have trouble getting that last bit of white film away from the yolk.

Mallets, moving cars, and great heights have all figured in suggestions of how to split open a pumpkin. We’ve been tempted to hurl ours off the balcony, but patience and a good chef’s knife should do the trick in the end. See step-by-step photos below… NOTE: We really only recommend this for small pie pumpkins that can easily be steadied with one hand. Anything over 3 or 4 pounds – use a saw or screwdriver and mallet. 1. Start with a small pie pumpkin.

I encounter a lot of chefs that don’t know how to peel garlic and end up doing it the long, hard way. Other chefs use packaged peeled garlic. Personally, I prefer to buy my garlic fresh at the Farmer’s Market and peel them myself. I think it’s more economical and sustainable this way – the garlic comes direct from the farmer without any plastic packaging, and has less carbon footprint because the garlic wasn’t processed by machines and then shipped to supermarkets.

Today is National Garlic Day and we can’t let it go by without another garlic tip! We’ve already talked about our unabashed love of pre-peeled garlic. We realized recently that we could roast these jumbo peeled cloves just like a regular papered head, and we’ve found this to be a great and easy way to use up extra garlic. After the garlic is roasted, we like to mash it with the oil to mix into fillings, or leave the cloves whole to be rubbed on toasts or bread with soft cheese.

The tip will change the way you mince your celery from here on out.

Before watching Brendan McDermott’s series of knife skills lessons, I thought I knew my way around a chef’s knife. You guys, I was wrong. In under two hours, this mini class taught me more about slicing and dicing than decades of trial-and-error experience in my home kitchen. Watch it right now and you’ll see exactly what I mean. Oh and best of all? It’s completely free. Brendan McDermott has cred to spare when it comes to culinary instruction.

You know, if you're into that kind of thing.

You likely already everything you need.

It uses an unexpected household kitchen item.

Just one bowl and one spatula dirty? Yes, please!

You'll wonder why you didn't know this sooner.

A half of a grapefruit is a pretty wonderful way to start your day. Sure it’s healthy, but even better, it’s a delicious and juicy treat that wakes you up with its puckery taste! Grapefruits do require a small amount of prep work, but it only takes a sharp knife and a short minute to free up those segments. Read on for our step-by-step instructions.You can’t just cut a grapefruit in half and dig in with a spoon. Well, you can but you will make a mess of it.

The winner was easy and efficient.

This trick for making soup toppers is so unbelievably easy!

It's something you probably already have.

Peeling is actually easier afterward: We'll show you how.

All you need are your hands!

For guacamole, smoothies, salads, avocado toast, and so much more!

It's a great way to get your anger out while you're cooking.

No messy bowls. No bruised, sticky cloves.

I’ve been cooking for a long time, and nothing has delighted or surprised me as much as this technique.

All you need is a wooden skewer.

Could this really be the answer to my (hard-boiled egg) dreams?

This tip has almost 50,000 likes on TikTok.

All you need is a wet paper towel.

Here are 3 times you can skip mincing garlic, even when a recipe calls for it.

The winner uses a little heat to save time.

This plate is stacked high with crispy, chewy snacks that fall somewhere between potato chips and French fries — and it's all because I didn't throw out my potato scraps.

Learn to wield an eight-inch blade (safely!) as well as any sous-chef in the business.

There are some tasks in the kitchen I don’t enjoy: grating cheese, shucking corn, and peeling and chopping garlic among them. The kids can take over some of those tasks, and they should, because — just like my mother told me, over and over — while they live in my house, they have to live by my rules. She also observed that when I had my own house, I could make my own rules. She was right. This totally came true! I make rules all the time! Even though they get broken.

When a local kitchen store called to see if I would be interested in trying one of their classes, I jumped at the chance. I’m a self taught cook and I have the scars and culinary tragedies in my past to prove it. Hoping to save at least one of my children from their own mistakes, I brought my 12 year old son Xander with me to the class. It was a lot of fun and we both learned how to use knives in a safer, more efficient way. By the time it was over, we were pros!

Sure, it’s a cliche. But when October rolls around, I want pumpkin. No, not the flavor of pumpkin spice, but actual pumpkin. I love pumpkin soup, pumpkin chili, even pumpkin muffins, and it seems more festive to buy a fresh one than pick up a few cans of purée. But peeling pumpkin is a pain, or it was until I learned a few tricks. Sadly, I know of no better way to remove the seeds than to just dig in to the slimy insides with my bare hands.

I used to be meticulous about peeling vegetables. Also? I used to eat a lot less vegetables and have three less children than I have today. I’ve gotten lazier about peeling, especially if the vegetables will be cooked. Besides, aren’t there nutrients in the skin of vegetables and fruits? In the end, whether or not the vegetable gets peeled depends on a few things. How do I make the decision? How many hours are there in a day? How busy am I and how long can I wait to eat?

When my child turned 1, it suddenly seemed like the world was conspiring to up her sugar intake. There were lollipops at the supermarket (and the bank), bowls of candy at family nights in our town square, birthday cupcakes at daycare, and fruit snacks at the playground. I had so much sugar anxiety that I once seriously debated skipping a friend’s party when I learned there would be store-bought cupcakes piled high with bright-blue frosting.

Packing lunch every day can get boring, but here’s a fun and inexpensive way to make it more fun. My colleague Meghan makes lunch for her kids each day and, on a hunt to keep her “lunch-packing spark alive,” she stumbled on the cutest little way to pack up condiments for lunch boxes. Meghan stumbled upon these condiment containers made for Japanese bento boxes and instantly fell in love.

“Your reaction is one of the worst that I’ve heard, Dr. Avnish Deobhakta, an ophthalmologist at New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai, tells me over the phone.

This shape makes eating watermelon even more fun (and less messy).