Vegetable skins are good for you, they say. Some don’t even need this kind of literal eat-your-vegetables marketing: Potato skins, which add texture and crisp up nicely, certainly have a decent following. Tomato skins, not so much.
Try this tomato peeling trick!
A little skin is fine on a raw tomato, and even acceptable on roasted ones, but I can think of other occasions when I’d rather use those tough, shriveled bits elsewhere, such as in making soups or sauces. But skinning tomatoes, which usually requires blanching, can be time-consuming and messy. But then I tried an alternative method: a trick with a grater that promised to make the skin easy to remove. And it really worked.
Although the idea of grating tomatoes has been around for a while, for some reason I never tried it until recently, when I was reminded of it by an Instagram post from chef Sara Moulton. I figured with all those late summer tomatoes rolling through my kitchen, it would be a good time to see if the trick was worth the hype. I sliced a ripe tomato in half, pressed it into the large holes on my grater, and started scrubbing. After that first tomato, I was convinced. I think I’m entering my grated tomato era.
With this method, the flavorful gel, seeds, and pulp end up on the other side of the grater in a bowl, leaving the skin behind. At first, and depending on the type of tomato, you will encounter resistance, and you may even feel the grater tearing the skin off the tomato. Persist—you just have to get started. I had the most success when I twisted the tomato half back and forth as I pressed. The liquid and seed gel go through first, and then you can use the skin as leverage to push more of the loose tomato pulp through until there is nothing left on the grater except the skin of half a tomato.
