This Viral Hack for Peeling Garlic Is Taking Over Twitter

I've always been a fan of simple yet wildly clever kitchen hacks that make mundane tasks faster and easier. My most recent discovery was this trick for juicing a lemon—without using a knife. It sounds impossible, I know. But it's not.

Neither is my newest find: a maneuver for peeling garlic that seems to defy everything I've ever been taught about, well, how to peel garlic.

In the video posted to Twitter, you can see someone holding an entire head of garlic (unpeeled of course) and using what looks to be a small paring knife (but what one Facebook commenter pointed out could be one half of a pair of kitchen scissors) to twist each clove straight out of its shell at an impressively quick rate.

Unsurprisingly, the video has swept like wildfire across the internet—even our beloved Chrissy Teigen has retweeted the video to her millions upon millions of followers. Her caption, true to form: "WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT."

But my biggest question is: Does this viral garlic-peeling hack actually work? Much like its lemon and pineapple hack predecessors, the answer is a bit of a mixed bag. One of Chrissy's Twitter followers found it to work like a charm. "This person is obviously more proficient, but in principle it worked; the garlic just popped out when I stabbed and twisted it," Patrick Alba wrote. Like us, he felt "so betrayed for not being taught this before."

Others, though, reported less success. Twitter user Rebecca Reid declared, "We have tried it in our office and it DOES NOT WORK." And there is an important point to be made about safety: You probably don't want to try this hack unless you're fairly skilled with a paring knife, otherwise you might run the risk of cutting yourself.

Still, this newfound garlic-peeling wisdom has me thinking that I ought to leave my desk right now and head to the grocery store across the street, pick up a head of garlic, and give it a try for myself. Because, if it does indeed work, you can bet I'll be making this roast chicken with 40 gloves of garlic (yes, 40) for dinner tonight—and probably every night for the rest of this week. And don't worry, I'll update this post to let you know the results.

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