It’s potato salad season, and that means peeling and cooking potatoes. Now it’s likely we’ve all peeled a potato before? So you know the routine: you get a bowl, a vegetable peeler, and your pile of scrubbed spuds. Then, you drag the peeler up and down and around the potato until it’s completely clean. In truth, this isn’t one of my 5 favorite things to do in the kitchen.

And here’s part of the reason why: It doesn’t stop with the simple peeling. After the spuds are peeled, there’s the cleanup process. As a potato is peeled, tiny sprays of potato starch land on the faucet, the backsplash, and etc. All this must be wiped away fairly soon or it hardens to the state of cement.

So this said, it’s fair to conclude potato peeling can be a relatively time-consuming and laborious process, even if you’re an expert. That’s why the suggestion given here is so amazing. In simple terms, it essentially explains how to peel your potatoes without all of the hard work. It came to me from my friend, Nola, in an email that was originally written by Nicholas Garcia (don’t know who this is, but I’m grateful he’s spreading the good news).

Don’t get me wrong, you still have to do some prep, but this technique involves far less elbow grease on your end. Indeed, with this time-saving method, all you will need is a knife, a large pot to boil your potatoes in, and a kettle to hold boiling water.

What you do is simple, yet ingenious: you score the potato skin in a straight line around the midsection of the potato, making sure that the ends of your scoring meet. Then, you place your potatoes in a pot, and from your kettle you pour boiling water over the potatoes.


After a few minutes, just drain the hot water, rinse the potatoes in very cold water, grab a potato, and pull. Voila! The skin comes right off. Then you place your peeled spuds back in the pot that held your original boiling water (it has more boiling water in it), and cook. I cut my spuds in chunks to facilitate faster cooking.

Since a picture’s worth a 1000 words, here’s a You Tube video that shows what I’ve just explained. You may be shocked at the ease of this method. Credit for this brilliance goes to potato peeler, Dave Hax. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbHeddAnrZs

Are there any disadvantages to this miraculous peeling technique? It depends. If you are a practiced peeler, this method might not save you any time. Conversely, you might enjoy using a traditional vegetable peeler so much that you don’t mind the extra effort it takes to prepare potatoes that way.

But either way, we probably ought to give this easy method a try. Mashed potatoes here we come!

    Alice Osborne
    Weekly Newsletter Contributor since 2006
    Email the author! alice@dvo.com