This time-saving hack makes peeling potatoes so much easier

Several years ago, my mother announced that we’d be having pre-prepared tubs of supermarket mashed potatoes with our Thanksgiving dinner. I gasped in shock.

“But it’s Thanksgiving!” I cried.

My mother replied that if real mashed potatoes were that important to me, I was welcome to take on the peeling/boiling/mixing regimen myself and serve them to our 16-member family.

I agreed, and that was the year I joined the holiday table with a minor case of carpal tunnel syndrome. It felt that way, anyway, to my poor wrists!

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The unfortunate truth about making fluffy, creamy, utterly delicious mashed potatoes is this: You’ve got to peel them first. And if you’ve got a lot of mouths to feed, that means flicking your poor wrist across one potato, two potato, three potato, four — and a whole lot more.

The good news is that there’s a hack for peeling potatoes that doesn’t even require a peeler.

Ever since that painful Thanksgiving, I have sworn off peelers and acquiesced to supermarket spuds — even on the holidays. But I’ve now learned a potato peeling method that doesn’t require physical trauma. And it’s easy!

Want to see this procedure in action? Check out this video from TikToker Jazz Leaf (she may have learned the trick from Nicole Jacques, who went viral with the trick a year earlier).

MORE: This is the best mashed potatoes recipe on the internet

Even the least talented cook in your family will be able to help with the mashed potatoes next Thanksgiving by using the following instructions, as posted in the comments of the video.

Boil water. Drag a paring knife along the diameter of each potato (width-wise), just barely breaking the skin. Drop the potatoes into the water and let them boil for 20 minutes. Remove the potatoes and let them cool for about 15 minutes.

Take one end of each potato and slide the skin off. Then, slide the other side off. According to TikToker @ChefJoanna, this trick also prevents your potatoes from being waterlogged; the skin remaining on them acts as a barrier keeping moisture out.

While Jazz Leaf may be exaggerating a little on the amount of time this saves, the method certainly cuts down on the elbow grease involved.

Looking for other ways to get that skin off your potatoes? Azure MacCannell at @livecomposed demonstrates another method that went viral over the holiday season, which lets you boil them and mash them without peeling. This seems to require a little more force, though, because you’ll have to push the boiled spuds through a cooling rack:

She recommends taking the bits of skin and air-frying them, which is a fantastic idea.

Are you ready to make mashed potatoes great again? I know I am.