In a restaurant kitchen, it’s usually the prep cooks or the dishwasher who get stuck with the food prep jobs everyone loathes. Trussing dozens of chickens, chopping up tubs of fruit salad—they never show that on cooking shows, because it’s repetitive and not edgy, hardly the makings of engaging television. (Do not hold your breath for a hit show called Top Prep.)
It’s the same way at home. There’s the part of cooking that’s fun, and the part that’s necessary. I asked my home cook friends which tasks they dread the most, and was not surprised when washing and cutting came up a lot. Here are the top replies. Whenever possible, we’ve offered tips to make those tasks go more smoothly. Still, some jobs get no love. It’s now officially confirmed: no one likes peeling raw shrimp.
Washing lettuce or fresh herbs
If you skip it, your greens can be gritty, and I always imagine invisible pesticide residue lurking on those leaves. But even with a salad spinner, somehow I get water all over the counter whenever I wash my greens.
Make it better: Using a salad spinner does make it a hundred times easier (I’ve had this model for out 15 years, and it’s still going strong). There’s also the time-tested trick of spinning the greens outside in a pillowcase. If that’s all too fussy for you, get the pre-washed stuff. It’s more expensive and has a chemical taste to me, but if washing greens is going to stand between you and salad, it’s better than no salad.
Peeling garlic
Cloves of garlic are small, and sometimes the peels cling very stubbornly.
Make it better: Old garlic gets rubbery and is tougher to peel, so try to only buy as many bulbs of garlic as you think you’ll use in two weeks or so. You already own the two best garlic-peeling tools around: a knife and your hand. Smack the garlic clove againe your cutting board with the flat side of your chef’s knife or your palm, and the peels should split and come off fairly easily.
Anything involving raw chicken
Salmonella salmonella salmonella. Also, drippy pinkish liquid and pimply flaccid skin. Bones and cartilage that are impossible to cut through unless you have a decent knife. Why do we even eat this stuff?
Make it easier: If you need to cut raw chicken, use the biggest cutting board you have. That will help contain the possibly salmonella-tainted liquid to one surface. If your knives (or you knife skills) are not great and you need to break bone-in chicken down into pieces, try poultry shears instead. A good pair can run $20 to $60. And as far as the chicken itself being slimy and off-putting: I don’t always buy locally-raised birds, but I’ve noticed they are a lot less icky to handle than industrially-raised birds, and they taste so much better.
Peeling and de-veining raw shrimp
This is the ultimate dishwasher/prep cook grunt job. Oh, the semi-thawed shrimp I have peeled over giant stainless steel sinks, only to emerge hours later with numb, prune-y fingers. The only thing worse is removing their thread-like digestive tracts, a task euphemistically called “de-veining.”
Make it easier: Shrimp are a lot tastier when you cook them with the shells on, so if I don’t see a lot of blackish silt in their digestive tracts, I don’t even peel them. It’s increasingly possible to buy peeled and butterflied shrimp, anyway—I have trouble finding shrimp that are not, but if you do score some, you can de-vein them without taking off the shell: insert a bamboo skewer between the segments of the shrimp shell close to the tail and thread the skewer under the vein. Then gently pull up to life the vein out. (This works best on larger shrimp with darker veins.)
Washing a food processor
How many components does that thing have, anyway? Make one batch of hummus and you wind up having a dozen oddly-shaped plastic doohickies to clean. Sometimes I put mine in the dishwasher, but it hogs up a lot of space in the racks.
Make it easier: If I’m going to drag out my food processor, I try to make a few different things in it, rinsing out the work bowl each time. Besides that, I have no suggestions outside of hiring a dishwasher.
Chopping onions
Unless you’re a Hare Krishna, peeling and dicing onions is probably the first thing you do when you make dinner. If your knives are on the dull side, or if you are particularly sensitive to onion fumes, this seemingly benign activity can quickly escalate to tears.
Make it easier: Sadly, they don’t teach a solid onion-chopping technique along with the ABCs, because knowing this one thing will shave minutes off nightly dinner prep. Here’s a good primer. But let’s say you have arthritis or generally despise knife work. Buy frozen diced onions, order takeout, or become a Hare Krishna.