I used to skip recipes that called for peeled tomatoes. Boil a pot of water, drop tomatoes in, fish them out, dunk in ice water — all that setup for a thirty-second step? Then I found out you can peel a tomato the same way you peel an apple and felt like an idiot.

No boiling water. No ice bath. No splashing. Just a vegetable peeler and a tomato. The trick is using the right kind of peeler and the right kind of tomato.

Choose the right tomato before you start

Roma tomatoes — the oblong ones — peel like a dream with a peeler. Their flesh is firmer and their skin is thicker than slicing tomatoes. Beefsteak tomatoes? Too soft. The peeler just turns them into mush. Stick with Roma or San Marzano for raw peeling.

Also: the tomato needs to be cold. Straight from the fridge. A room-temperature tomato is too soft to hold its shape against a peeler blade. I learned this after massacring three perfectly good tomatoes that had been sitting on the counter all day.

The actual peeling technique

Use a serrated vegetable peeler if you have one. The teeth grip the skin better than a straight blade. A standard peeler works too but you need to be gentler.

Hold the tomato in one hand. Start at the top, near where the stem was. Drag the peeler downward in one smooth motion — don’t saw back and forth, that tears the skin. Rotate the tomato as you go. You’ll get the hang of it after the first one.

I can peel a Roma tomato in about twenty seconds now. It took me maybe three tomatoes to get the feel for it. The first one was a disaster — I pressed too hard and basically peeled half the flesh off with the skin. Light pressure. Let the blade do the work.

When the peeler method won’t work

If your tomatoes are very ripe — the kind that dent when you press them — don’t bother with the peeler. They’ll collapse. For those, the boiling water method is actually the right call: score an X on the bottom, drop in boiling water for 30 seconds, plunge into ice water, the skin slips right off.

But for 90% of the tomatoes in my kitchen, the peeler is faster, cleaner, and uses zero extra dishes. That’s the real win here — I’m not washing a pot and an ice water bowl just to peel two tomatoes.

• Best tomatoes for peeling: Roma or San Marzano, cold from the fridge
• Best peeler: Serrated vegetable peeler
• Technique: Light pressure, single downward strokes
• Ripe tomatoes fallback: Score X, boil 30 seconds, ice bath