The Video of a Man Peeling Artichokes We Have on Repeat

I love eating artichokes, but hand me a raw one and ask me to cut it and I’ll look at you like I looked at the stranger who stepped on my foot this morning as they simultaneously attempted to scale a flight of stairs and respond to an Instagram comment, instead of just committing to walking like any normal pre-2009 person would. Whatever. Back to artichokes.

Artichokes are like the armadillos of vegetables, cute but heavily armored. They have a select and devoted following, but who the heck knows what to do with them? Definitely not me. Thank goodness Emma put together this very chef-y guide on how to get your artichoke on. It’s full of very handy tips:

How to Cook Artichokes With *Confidence*, According to 5 Chefs

Read Article

Still, none of that advice can hold a candle to what I witnessed this morning (after the toe-stomping incident) once I got to my desk. It’s so amazing, like, so intensely awesome and disgustingly exciting that I should probably spare you any more of my wildly excessive and overwhelmingly flowery diction and just share it with you. Here you go:

No sure what you just witnessed? Yeah, me neither. What little is left of my brain after this video exploded it tells me that this man may have found the fastest, most deft and skilled way to peel an artichoke. He starts with the leaves, skinning them off at rocket-ship speeds as he rotates the vegetable with one hand and wields a knife in the other. They fly to the floor as if earth’s gravity were three times its current strength. Then he gets to the core, or the heart, of the artichoke and spins it like a Ferris wheel gone mad against his blade, until what’s left is the very smooth center of the vegetable that once was. And as if all that weren’t enough, he then scoops out the choke, that collection of forebodingly named spines, and behold! An artichoke heart as soft and smooth and sculpted as an earthenware pot. (How’s that for a collection of similes?)

The video gives little in the form of information, but from what I can deduce this man is Turkish, or at the least, he is somewhere in Turkey. As it turns out, he isn’t alone. Videos of men peeling artichokes at breakneck speeds are kind of a thing. And thanks to YouTube, they’re all in one place. Check out two others I was able to find:

Well, la-di-da, if this isn’t the best thing I’ve found on the internet in a while, then I don’t know what is. Don’t mind me, I’ll be watching these on repeat for the rest of the day.

Are you as sold as I am? Tell me what you think in the comments below.