Cooking tricks are always fun. About a year ago, the magazine Saveur released a video called How to Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds (embedded at the bottom of this post) that went viral on YouTube. In it, the chef teaching the tip explains how to use friction, two metal cooking bowls and a little arm strength to peel a whole head of garlic. If you haven’t seen this trick, you’ll want to.

Other Cooking Tricks

There are a TON of other cooking tricks out there on YouTube, but the best ones will be learned in the kitchens of your friends. Most of my favorite involve doing things faster without a knife than you can do them with one — kinda like the garlic trick I just explained. Today, we’ll take a look at 4 cooking tricks you might not have heard of. All of them involve fruits and veggies, and none of them involve knives.

How to Lose Less Ginger When Peeling it

Peeling ginger can be annoying. If you do it wrong, you’ll end up whittling a big piece of ginger into a tiny sliver by the time you’re done peeling it. Even using a veggie peeler can end up carving away most of the root.

Here’s how to make sure you only peel the skin and don’t lose any root: Peel it with a spoon!

It’s still possible to dig too hard into the ginger when peeling with the dull edge of a spoon; the key is to scrape across the skin.

How to Know Your Asparagus Won’t Be Tough

The worst thing about asparagus that’s perfectly cooked is that, if you cut too little of the stem off when preparing it, it will still be tough. This can cause all kinds ofheadaches — nothing’s worse than overcooked asparagus with chewy, stringy stalk. Yuck.

The trick to perfect asparagus is not cutting it at all. Breaking the stems off asparagus will ensure it’s never tough!

You can end up losing a little edible asparagus in the process but as you get better at feeling where it should break, you’ll lose less.

How to De-Stem Kale Quickly and Easily

Here’s a new one I learned recently, since my fiancee and I have been eating more kale this summer than ever before. I always used to either slice the leaves from the stems with a knife or cut it off with kitchen shears. Both methods take forever!

Simply running your closed hand down the stem will remove all of the leaf into your hand, leaving you with the tough stem in the other.

The fact that kale leaves only have one main stem, with very small branches heading out into the leaves makes this trick possible; Try this method with other leafy veggies of similar structure.

How to Lose Less Kiwi When Peeling One

Like ginger, kiwis can be really frustrating to peel without leaving all the fruit on the insides of the inedible skin. This trick involves a knife. (I lied.) But just to cut the top off. After that, all the power is in the spoon.

Stick a spoon in, swirl it around the inside of the kiwi once, and pull out the whole, peeled kiwi.

This one can take time to get good at. But PerkStreet community manager Jennifer Spencer can do it perfectly every time, leaving almost no kiwi behind.

The Famous Head of Garlic in 10 Seconds Video

Here’s the original video I promised to include, which will teach you how to peel a whole head of garlic in just 10 seconds. As far as cooking tricks go, this is really an impressive one.

One note when trying this one yourself: There’s a reason the chef puts all the skins and cloves into the bowl before lidding and shaking it. The friction from the papery skins helps peel them off the slippery garlic.

Cooking Tricks: Final Thoughts

There are a lot of cooking tricks out there. Did you know only 1 of the 3 “eyes” in a coconut is soft enough to poke a hole in and get the coconut milk out of? Has anyone ever shown you how to make a handle from an onion’s skin so you don’t accidentally cut your fingers when making perfectly round onion slices? Or how to ensure the onion doesn’t make you cry? What about how to quickly re-hydrate dried beans with a pressure cooker?

Surely you have a favorite cooking trick or two. Leave your best in the comments section below (with links if you have them) and let’s get a good list going!

Share your favorite cooking tricks below or let us know what you think of these!