How To Skin Tomatoes

Hi there, I'm Matt from the Underground Cookery School, and today I'm going to do a video cookery lesson for you. So, I'm going to show you how to skin a tomato, which I think is quite an important thing to do. The outer skin of a tomato is completely indigestible, and there's no nutritional content to it.

And it doesn't taste particularly nice, and in fact, it masks all the beautiful flavors of the tomato. Well, the first thing you need to do is get a pan of boiling water on the go, which I have, and you also need a pan of very cold water so that when we blanch and then re-blanch, the tomato stops cooking because what you don't want is a soggy tomato. You now take out the eye, and then roughly score the bottom.

Now, that might seem simple but you do need to use the right knife. This one is serrated and is commonly referred to as a tomato knife. Don't fall into the trap that I did the first time I bought one of these and buy one that had anything other than a point to the end.

Right, tomato goes in, now cooking times obviously vary in accordance with how big the pan is, how many tomatoes you are doing at any one time and various other things which I can't think of at the moment. But what you want to do is just let that cook away, and what will happen is in sort of a few seconds, the skins will start to split, so that one is perhaps a little bit too, my spider there is too big, but you can see the skin split there. So if you then throw that into the cold water, as I mentioned earlier on, it completely halts the cooking process, and you'll find that the skin comes away with the greatest of ease.

The beauty of that is that this bit, which doesn't taste very nice, has now got nothing to do with your tomato, and this bit, which does taste very nice, will now make the perfect tomato salad. And that's now you skin a tomato. .