The No-Fuss Tomato-Peeling Trick Italian Nonnas Swear By

If there is a clever food shortcut for something, you better believe an Italian nonna knows about it. The older Italian generation seems to have a hack for basically everything, and this one involves peeling tomatoes with no boiling water required. What you do instead is gently run the edge of a knife across a tomato's skin, more like pressing into it than slicing it, until the skin loosens and can be peeled away by hand.

The reason this hack feels so appealing is because it looks so unbelievably simple. If you ever learned how to peel tomatoes, you know that it usually involves boiling them in water until the skin cracks, then putting them in an ice bath before peeling the skin off. And while it works, it's also a process that involves waiting for water to heat up, staying vigilant so as not to overcook the tomatoes, and then washing up a load of pots after. But with the Italian nonna trick, you need nothing more than a firm, ripe tomato and a small knife. To try it yourself, simply drag the blade across the skin a few times. While it may seem like nothing is happening, after a few goes like this, the skin will separate in one area of the tomato. You can then peel it, kind of like a banana, section by section.

Traditionally, people rely on heat to loosen the skin from the flesh, because tomato skin may be thin, but it is really stubborn. This knife trick simply approaches the problem from a different angle. By repeatedly dragging the blade over the surface, it seems that it weakens the connection that holds the skin to the fruit in a similar way to how heat does. And with the knife trick, there is also another advantage: less of the tomato goes to waste. It's not usually recommended that you cut your tomato with a knife peeler or a knife, as you'll usually end up taking half the flesh off alongside it, but this method loosens instead of cutting so it slips off without disturbing the fruit beneath.

Peeling may seem like an unnecessary extra step, but there are many recipes that rely on a fresher texture than skin-on tomatoes can provide. Using peeled, perfectly ripe tomatoes for bruschetta makes it that much fresher, and it's a similar story for things like gazpacho, salsa, and marinara sauces. This trick is possibly the easiest way to achieve a peeled tomato — very minimal fuss, hardly any cleanup, and the feeling that you picked up a piece of kitchen wisdom from one of the most brilliant chefs in existence: someone's nonna.