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This Old-Fashioned Apple Peeler Is the Best Way to Peel Apples

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A King Arthur Apple Peeler, Corer and Slicer in the middle of peeling a red apple with a few other apples in a stack nearby.
Photo: Marki Williams
Sofia Sokolove

By Sofia Sokolove

Sofia Sokolove leads the newsletters team. She is a devotee of the Dyson Supersonic hair dryer.

If you’ve ever made an apple pie and peeled your apples with anything but an old-fashioned apple peeler, you’re doing it wrong. Absolutely nothing can peel, core, and slice apples as fast as this three-in-one rotary tool.

And before you write it off as a single-task kitchen gadget, let me say: I hear you. I did not grow up in a kitchen gadget household. My family’s Thanksgiving pie crust is much more likely to be weighted down by dried beans than pie weights. We make homemade whipped cream using just a metal bowl, a whisk, and some serious wrist strength.

But when it comes to prepping the apples to fill the aforementioned pie or making applesauce for Rosh Hashanah? That’s when we bring out the machinery.

It’s simply exponentially faster than any other method. So speedy, in fact, that even if you only need to peel apples a few times a year (like most Wirecutter staffers who own one), it’s still worth buying—but especially if you’re using it, like my family does, on days like Thanksgiving, when all burners are firing and every saved second counts.

Most old-fashioned three-in-one apple peelers are pretty similar, but we like that this one is all metal and comes with a two-year warranty.

We’ve had our family apple peeler for over 30 years. I’m not sure where it came from, and I actually can’t remember a time without it. But the one I used recently in Wirecutter’s test kitchen—left over from when senior staff writer Lesley Stockton peeled 126 pounds of apples during testing for our food dehydrator guide—is nearly identical. Though we haven’t formally tested them, many of the options available today seem similar. In fact, the technology (if you can call it that) hasn’t changed much since hand-crank peelers were invented over 150 years ago.

Senior editor Jennifer Hunter says that the apple peeler she used all the time growing up—on an organic vegetable farm in Oregon—looked exactly like our staff favorite, too. Although she’s pretty sure hers “came out of an old barn or something.”

You push the bottom of the apple onto the prongs of the rotary rod, move it flush against the peeler, and start cranking the wooden handle. In about 10 seconds—really—you have a peeled and cored apple, sliced into perfect, juicy rings. Plus a very pleasing pile of ribboned peel. (If you want, you can also disengage the peeler to just core and slice, or remove the coring and slicing blade to just peel.)

I recently peeled, cored, and sliced nine large apples—about the amount you’d need for most apple pie recipes—and cleaned everything up, all in under five minutes. Lesley estimates that the gargantuan task of peeling apples for dehydrator testing would have taken her “easily five times longer” without this mighty little tool.

A King Arthur Apple Peeler, Corer and Slicer with an apple core on its end next to a peeled and spiraled apple and its spiraled peel.
Photo: Marki Williams

Also? It’s just fun. The sheer speed and efficiency makes me feel like I’m a contestant on Top Chef, while the actual apparatus makes me feel like I’m churning butter in the 1890s. I can’t explain it, but that strange duality just works.

Like with any handheld tool, a little trial and error is involved. I’ve found the faster you crank, the better. If you start and stop—either on purpose or because of a bruised or otherwise misshapen apple—the peel can get tangled and take you off-track. (Speaking of the peeler, be careful. It’s sharp.)

And though the rubber base has a lever to help it suction your countertop, it can be finicky and lose stickiness over time. Placing one hand over the base as you crank works well to steady the machine. Wetting the base a bit can help it stick too, a tip Lesley picked up somewhere along the way to dehydrating 126 pounds of apples.

Unless you’re a dehydrating hobbyist or are lucky enough to have your own apple tree, you probably won’t use your apple peeler that often. But I like to think its seasonality gives it its own kind of patina. Some of my earliest Thanksgiving memories are sitting at the kitchen counter, peeling apples. Now I supervise my nephews doing the same.

For my family, the hand-crank apple peeler’s presence has become just as synonymous with the holiday as the sour-cream apple pie we use it to make. Call me old-fashioned, but I’m not sure that a more-modern gadget would hold such a pull over me. And I’ve certainly yet to find one that gets the job done nearly as well.

This article was edited by Marguerite Preston and Catherine Kast.

Meet your guide

Sofia Sokolove

Sofia Sokolove is the audience development manager for newsletters at Wirecutter. She spent 10 years working as a writer, editor, and audience journalist in Austin, Texas, so she comes by her overuse of “y’all” honestly. She now lives in Brooklyn, where she spends a lot of time cooking, playing fetch with her Boston terrier, and surfing at Rockaway Beach.

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