Cooking is one of the most rewarding activities you can do on any given day. You get to spend some time with yourself, doing a very therapeutic activity, and you get to enjoy the fruit of your own labor at the end. This whole thing gets even better when you’re cooking for someone you love. Unfortunately, cooking is not full of sunshine and roses. There are a lot of minor and major parts of cooking that are not fun at all. One of these unpleasant parts, at least for a lot of people, is peeling vegetables. It is especially an issue when all you have is an average kitchen knife. Luckily, there are many different tools and gadgets available today to make cooking as streamlined as possible. A potato peeler is one of these tools that makes skinning any vegetable or fruit an absolute breeze.
Benefits of a Potato Peeler
A quality peeler will allow you to completely remove the peel from almost any fruit or vegetable in a matter of seconds. You can do it with a sharp knife, but that process is very tedious, and it ends up wasting a lot of perfectly edible material. Potato peelers, on the other hand, only remove the skin with surprisingly good efficiency. Additionally, they are much easier to hold than peeling with a knife, and they are substantially better for your finger’s well-being.
How to Properly Use a Potato Peeler
A potato peeler makes working with potatoes and other similar veggies much easier. Learning to use a peeler is also not that difficult, and almost anyone can do it. However, there is a technique for using it correctly. Doing it wrong will not only slow down the peeling process to a halt but it will also waste a lot of edible material. This is how to properly peel a potato with a quality peeler:
- Hold the potato in your non-dominant hand.
- Make sure the longer side of the potato is between your wrist and fingers.
- Now hold the peeler in your dominant hand.
- Grab it between your fingers and not your fist.
- Put the thumb of this hand on top of the potato.
- Now slowly glide the peeler towards you.
- Do not try to pull the peeler too hard.
- If it gets stuck, just back up and try again.
You can also do the same thing but peel away if you’re not comfortable with peeling towards yourself.
Uses of a Potato Peeler
A lot of people assume that potato peelers are just for peeling, well, potatoes. But, they are much more than that. Sure, peeling potatoes is their intended use, but you can use this ingenious device in many more ways. Here are a few of the most practical uses of potato peelers that you might know about:
Thinly sliced onions
Slicing onions in thin sheets with a knife is extremely difficult, and something even seasoned chefs would struggle with. But you can get shockingly thin slices with the help of a quality potato peeler.
Chocolate shavings
Chocolate is very brittle in its hard form, and trying to do anything with a knife can end in disaster. Luckily, you can use a potato peeler instead to create thin shavings. You can then use these shavings for decorating cakes and other desserts.
Decorating lemon
Thinking of making cocktails for your friends at a house party and want to show off a little? Use a potato peeler to carve out ridges in the lemon’s skin. This will make the lemon slice look like a cog. Plus, this simple change will elevate the aesthetic of your cocktails more than you think.
Soap shavings
This use is outside the realm of food, but it is still great to know about. Parents know this feeling. You give your kids a bar of soap to clean themselves up, and you later find that bar absolutely destroyed in the sink. So, what you can do instead is make thin shavings of the soap bar and hand out a single slice when it’s cleanup time.
Picking the Right Potato Peeler
So far, we’ve talked a lot about how potato peelers are one of the best tools in a modern kitchen and how they can be used for a lot more than just peeling potatoes. But, the thing is, these uses, etc., only apply to quality potato peelers. These are the attributes you have to look out for before making a potato peeler purchase.
Quality of the blade
Make sure the blade is made out of stainless steel and has a really sharp edge. Also, it should have around 30 degrees of swivel to it so you can peel rough vegetables like potatoes.
Quality of the handle
The quality of the handle will matter when you’d have to use a peeler for longer than a few minutes. Make sure the peeler you’re buying has an ergonomic handle with a grippy texture.
Replaceable blades
This is not a mandatory feature, but replaceable blades increase the lifespan of a peeler by a lot. Changing the blade is also much more economical than buying a new potato peeler every time the blade gets busted.
