Potatoes are a staple of many diets across the world due to the fact that they are extremely easy to grow, and have quite a bit of nutritious value to keep you full for quite a long time. Potatoes have made their way into many foods that we find every day in our lives including french fries, chicken dishes, even breakfast with hash browns.
Learning how to cook with and use potatoes properly is a great skill to have, but anybody who cooks with them knows the longest and most painstaking part of the entire process of working with them: peeling them first.
If this is a part of cooking with potatoes that you hate doing, then don’t worry because there is a much easier way to peel potatoes that many people do not know about, and all you need is some hot and cold water!
So forget the peeler, scraped knuckles, and time consuming labor and try out this trick next time you need some potatoes for your dish.
Grab the amount of potatoes you need and place them boiling water until they are cooked through. The best type of potato to use for this type of trick is russet potatoes.
Once they are done cooking, place them in an ice bath for anywhere between 5 and 10 second, or until they are cool enough for you to handle comfortably with your bare hands. After they are done cooling off, simple hold the potato with two hands and twist and pull to the sides.
The skin should come right off with little to no effort in seconds, and you will have a perfectly cooked and peeled potato in a fraction of the time that you would have spent if you were to have peeled them by hand with a peeler or knife.
This way is generally safer as well because then you do not need to work with a blade in close proximity, however be mindful of how hot the potatoes can get so that you do not end up burning yourself.
This method of peeling potatoes also works very well when you are trying to make mashed potatoes. You will be able to peel and mash the potatoes with one boiling process. Simply boil, chill, pull the skin off, and then you will be ready to mash them right then and there!
One great thing to try as well is keeping the skin on about half the potatoes, and take the skins off of the rest of them. This will allow for additional flavor and nutritious value to be added to you mashed potato dish. In fact, the skin of the potato is the must nutritious part of the entire thing!
If you want to see visually how this peeling trick is actually done, then you can check out the video below posted by Chowhound, which shows you how to get the skin off from start to finish in 41 seconds total.
Let us know if you have ever used this trick in the comments!
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