I’m always looking for the most efficient way to peel an orange. I usually make 5 cuts lengthways to score the skin. Then the peel come off in 4 segments. Works pretty good. A lot better than just digging in and ripping off small pieces with my fingernails.
This guy has a clever idea. I noticed that his knife went right between two segments. You think he lined up his cut by looking at the top? Hard to tell from the video but how else did he make such a perfect cut?
I’m not sure anything works with oranges that have a thick white inner skin. Sticks to the orange and just won’t come off cleanly. Leaves a bitter taste.
I’ll pick up a couple oranges next time I’m at the grocery. I want to try this new method.
I use a peeling ring, which is a plastic ring for your finger with a curved guide surface and a sharp plastic blade in it. You just run your hand longitudinally over the Orange and then peel off the sections. They give rings away around here every Spring come harvest time, along with the screw-in plastic spouts for squeezing juice out of an orange.
My wife attends enough Tupperware parties that we have bunch of these. It works like the ring mentioned earlier, with a sharp point on one end to pierce the skin and then you make longitude slits (I make 8 slits). Then the thin end is to get under the white and pull the skin away. It usually works OK.
Its not an orange, its a tangerine. Big difference when it comes to peeling!
Certain tangerine varieties have a peel that comes off with little effort. All oranges (Washington Navel, Valencia, Blood oranges etc.) on the other hand, are more difficult to peel. Its best just slice them in quarters and rip the meat out with your teeth.
Just cut it in half, then half again and eat from the quarter.
Added bonus that you can put the peel in your mouth behind your lips but in front of your teeth and pretend to be a freak.
Yup. If it’s not a nice think rind that I can peel with my fingers, I use a citrus peeler. I like to make super thin strips that spiral from the top to the bottom, so the peel comes off in a giant 12’ strip.
Oh, a spiral! How fancy! I’ll have to give that a try.
Around our house, if you can peel a orange and the skin stays intact in one piece, you get to make a wish. Plus it looks like a miniature globe; you can see how a 3-D sphere maps to 2-D when laid out flat.
I picked up a couple of these “citrus birds” in a Japanese version of a 99-cent store; it makes a novel gift for people who like kitchen gadgets. The beak splits the surface, the tail parts the rind, and the wing comes off for use in separating the rind from the meat.
Also, thinking of Japan & Citrus, I noticed a lot of Japanese restaurants will offer an orange as dessert and present it in a special way: They cut through the rind at the equator and spiral-peel back to the stem, then separate the wedges from the intact rind (the un-spiraled half). Then they set the wedges back in and put the spiral back on. The customer then gets to pull away the curly ‘lid’ and can easily pick out the pre-separated wedges with his/her chopsticks.
That’s a lovely presentation, but it probably wouldn’t be considered ‘most efficient’ by any means.
