The peel is thicker and attached firmly to the root, so cutting off the root end first will save a lot of time and effort peeling garlic.
you can avoid stripping the peel into tiny sticky pieces or digging grooves into the clove while you gouge or scrape off the peel from the top or side.
this is another lifehack I would have appreciated learning years earlier.
I cut the root off and use the garlic peeler tube
does this make peeling garlic easier for you?
I could never peel more than one piece of garlic at a time with these, and still had to do all the prep work beforehand of cutting off both ends and then cleaning the tube every time, and I had to push really hard on the tube.
the tubes were a lot more work for me than crushing or cutting off the root and peeling.
Same trick goes for onions. Bonus points of you leave a little still attached for use as a pull tab.
Another good method is to get two large metal bowls face to face with the cloves inside, and shake the shit out of them like a human fire alarm.
Be warned though, this WILL terrify your cats, if you have any
I haven’t heard of this one, you shake the garlic cloves and they bump into each other and peel themselves? or does this have something to do with the specification of metal bowls?
that seems like a lot of work.
is that a lot of work?
I would imagine it’s more the collisions with a hard surface, and metal bowls are simply the lightest way to do that. It’s actually not a lot of work; it maybe takes 20 seconds of shaking. I like the other suggestion of using a cocktail shaker, though. That would be quieter AND easier, assuming it’s equally effective
I couldn’t stop thinking about the shake-peel so I just gave it a whirl.
two full bulbs pf garlic later, my first impressions of the shake-peel go like this:
I’m shocked this works at all.
lots of cloves are unpeeled after multiple shaking sessions.
deeper bowls could make a difference.
I have to clean the bowls afterward because garlic juice is coating the entire inside of the bowl.
The garlic cloves are very bruised and damaged after the shaking.
prep work of cutting off the root end and the top of the cloves makes them much more likely to be peeled by the end of the shaking.
maybe if I get better at this or I have better tools, this will save time and effort; right now it’s more difficult and disrupts my chill kitchen flow with some pretty frantic shaking, but I could see it getting easier and less disruptive as I get used to it.
definitely an interesting suggestion and something I’ll try to improve on, thanks for bringing it up.
Bonus points if you leave a tiny bit of the root attached to the skin so that when you pull the root off it starts the peeling process