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How to peel a tomato
Tuesday March 1, 2005
It might sound dull and pointless, removing the skin from a tomato, but it really can make a huge difference to the end results of a recipe.
Choose good tomatoes
Being heavily influenced by Italian cookery, I can't emphasise this enough; if you attempt to apply this process to those forced, never seen soil, left to ripen on supermarket shelves, abominations that must surely fall foul of the trade descriptions act, then you are not going to meet with success. I hate these kinds of tomatoes with a passion, don't buy them. Tell you friends not to buy them, stamp on them, throw them at people, use them as doorstops but for the sake of all that is good and true, please don't cook with them.
Ahem, anyway, like I was saying you need to buy good quality tomatoes, they should be properly ripe but still firm, if you can get them on the vine, even better.
Preparing the tomatoes
Take a small, sharp knife and insert it into the outer edge of the eye of the tomato i.e. the bit where it was once attached to the vine, and using the outer edge of the eye as a guide run your knife around the eye in a circular motion until it is loosened and can easily be removed. Take care here, you are not looking for a hole that looks like a meteor impact, you want to remove as little of the tomato flesh as possible, so don't dig the knife in too deep, about the height of your average well trimmed, or well chewed in my case, little finger nail. With this done, turn the tomato over and put two incisions, forming an X shape, just deep enough to pierce the skin.
One elephant, two elephant
Next you need a big pan of rapidly boiling water and a big bowl of iced water (if you don't have any ice, free up your sink and put in plenty of cold water). Pop your tomatoes into the boiling water so that they are completely covered with water and count to ten, then transfer the tomatoes quickly from the hot water to the cold water. It is this sudden change of temperature that will cause the skin to peel off really easily. Don't leave the tomatoes in the cold water any longer than is needed to cool them down, a minute or two maximum. With this done the skin should quite literally come away just using your fingers to peel, if it doesn't, pop them back into the boiling water for a few more seconds and then dunk them back in the cold water.
Job done!
Aaron Moore
1182 days ago
Aaron Moore
1182 days ago
Aaron Moore
1182 days ago