Peeling tomatoes is one of those things that I’ve always avoided. I don’t peel tomatoes for pasta sauce, and I make no-peel salsa. It’s always seemed potentially difficult, not to mention time-consuming and messy. Cutting and boiling and ice water and peeling? Surely that takes hours of tedium.
Turns out not so much. I’ve been after making tomato jam for a while, and after my first attempt (with skins on) turned out more like tomato sauce than tomato jam, I figured it was time to suck it up and peel the damn things. It turns out that peeling tomatoes is super easy, and not very time-consuming at all–I think that once I got the water boiling, it took me about fifteen minutes to peel almost four pounds of tomatoes.
It turns out that to peel a tomato, you do exactly what everything says to do: drop it in boiling water, then cool it, and it’ll slip right out of the skin. If you are–like I was–staring at that and going “yeah, right,” here’s more detail.
On the bottom (non-stem end) of the tomato, cut an X. It doesn’t have to be big–half an inch or so is just fine. It also doesn’t have to be deep–it just has to break the skin. Toss the tomatoes, a few at a time, into a pot of boiling water. Then you let them sit. The internet often says that you should leave them in about thirty seconds, but this is both a pain in the ass (who wants to sit there and count out thirty seconds over and over?) and sort of a lie. What you ought to do is leave them in the pot until the skin has split open from top to bottom. For some tomatoes, this means you’ll take them out after a minute; with a few of the less ripe Romas that I had, it took more like three minutes. Just fish them out as they finish. Toss the hot tomato into a bowl of ice water (or onto a cookie tray or something to cool) and toss another tomato into the pot.
When the tomatoes are cool, just grab the skin and lift it off.
Super, super easy. I feel like an idiot for having avoided this for fifteen years. Luckily, I’m not that old, so I can still get a good fifty or sixty years out of my newfound knowledge.
This makes sense. I think we used to boil them without cutting the Xes and waiting for them to split on their own. It worked, but it was a bit more work. Mmm, I want salsa now, thank you.
Man, reading this, for some reason I want it to be Jan 2012 Right Now, so we can do this together! In the same room! IDK. I’m glad it was so easy.