The Simplest Way To Peel Garlic Involves Two Bowls

Garlic can enhance a wide variety of dishes, adding an extra tasty flavor to your pasta, stir fry, or steak. Plus, oven-fresh garlic bread is one of the ultimate comfort foods. In addition to tasting delicious, garlic may boost your immune system, reduce your blood pressure, and even help to prevent Alzheimer's.

Unless you buy pre-minced garlic, your food prep may involve peeling cloves of garlic for your recipe. Although garlic skin isn't technically dangerous to eat, it can have an unpleasantly tough texture — not necessarily something you want when using garlic primarily as seasoning in your dishes. (You can save the skin for later use in stocks, strained sauces, or even grinding it up to use on garlic bread.)

If you find a recipe that requires numerous cloves of garlic, peeling each one by hand can be tedious and time-consuming. Fortunately, there may be an easier trick to peeling several cloves at once.

No one likes having garlicky smelling hands, but when your recipe calls for quite a few cloves, it may seem inevitable. However, there is one method to peel several cloves quickly without having to handle them too much.

Have a Plant suggests placing your cloves of garlic into a metal bowl. Then, grab a second metal bowl of the same size, placing it on top to create an orb shape with the garlic trapped inside. Carefully hold the bowls together and shake the garlic around.

After shaking for a while, separate the bowls to check the cloves. If they still have skin, continue shaking until they are ready to use. Though there may be some stubborn skin pieces stuck that have to be removed manually, the shaking will do the bulk of the work.

Plus, as a bonus, metal typically repels the smell of garlic, so using metal bowls can keep your hands from smelling like garlic.

Although your garlic-filled food may smell delicious, that doesn't mean you want your hands to smell like it for the rest of the night. Garlic is notoriously strong-smelling, and can leave your hands smelling pretty potent after working with it. Fortunately, this bowl hack can help prevent much of the smell, as you'll have to do significantly less handling of the garlic while prepping it to cook.

According to Food Network, T3 copper seemed to be the material that repelled the garlic smell the best. Stainless steel — which is a common material for mixing bowls, knives, and saucepans — was able to remove most of the smell. However, Food Network does note that it occasionally left a metallic scent behind.

The next time you're getting ready to cook your favorite garlic parmesan wings or some garlic butter baked shrimp, try out this trick to make peeling every clove easy.