Ina Garten's Clever Hack For Coring Apples With (Almost) Zero Waste

Ina Garten's favorite dessert — nay, her favorite simple and elegant culinary creation ever — is a French apple tart. This rustic yet mouth-watering treat features a slab of pastry topped with a layer of sliced tart apples dressed with a bit of sugar, butter, apricot jam, and rum. While Garten's original easy-to-make recipe only uses four apples, other apple-loaded desserts such as apple pie, apple crumble, or even applesauce may use quite a few more than that. And, as baking with apples typically requires peeling, coring, slicing and/or dicing, any expert tips to expedite the process are appreciated.

The Barefoot Contessa herself has an excellent method for getting apples ready for consumption, which she shared on the Food Network's TikTok page. Start by slicing the fruit in half. Then, use a melon baller to dig out the core. Next, use a knife (Garten prefers the German Wüsthof brand) to chop out the step and calyx (aka "the bottom part of the apple"). If your recipe requires peeled apples, be sure to remove the skin before slicing them in half. After following these steps, you would only have removed a small ball of seeds and a couple triangles of flesh — no bits that most people would want to eat anyway.

Ina Garten's hack for coring apples may not be the most common, but it does seem to be the least wasteful. Another go-to method is to cut around the core, which is fairly easy but does discard the entire middle column of your apple rather than just the top, bottom, and very center.

Other people may have been taught to chop the full apple into quarters and then excise the sliver of core at the top of each slice. This method may be less wasteful than taking out the entire core, top to bottom, but may require using two separate knives: a larger one for slicing the full apple and a smaller one for removing the core safely.

Of course, cooks can find a variety of apple-coring gadgets out there as well, from a straightforward, wand-like corer, such as the OXO Good Grips Apple Corer, to a device you push down over the top of your apple that both cores and slices it at the same time. And don't forget the heavy-duty CucinaPro Apple Peeler and Corer, a fancy countertop contraption that can peel, core, and spiral-cut your apples with the turn of a crank. But with all of these, you are still cutting out the entire center of the apple rather than just the pieces you really don't need. Whichever technique you end up trying, make sure to choose the best apple variety for baked goods, whether you're going to be throwing your apples into a cake or making Ina Garten's famous French apple tart.