The Key To Better Homemade Coleslaw Is A Vegetable Peeler

Dutch settlers are credited with bringing coleslaw to America. The original cabbage salad, or koosla in Dutch, was made from cabbage grown near New York's Hudson River. At its most basic, Merriam-Webster defines coleslaw as being made with raw cabbage. Although ingredients vary wildly from recipe to recipe, typically, they include the essential cabbage along with carrots, mayonnaise, and apple cider vinegar. The barbecue staple is very easy to make, and the primary challenge is chopping up the larger ingredients.

To cut carrots and cabbage down to those trademark crunchy strips, you could use a sharp knife, but it's sure to be time-consuming. You could also use a spiralizer or a food processor. However, the downside of using an appliance is you'll spend more time cleaning it than shredding the ingredients. A simple hack is to use a vegetable peeler. Just run the peeler down the side of a clean carrot and you will be left with the shreds you need for your coleslaw. This method is quick, convenient, easy, and involves minimal cleanup — you just have to wash the vegetable peeler.

Vegetable peelers are usually associated with carrots and potatoes, but you can use this handy tool on a much wider variety of foods, including cheese, butter, chocolate, onions, celery, and more. In fact, you can even use a vegetable peeler on cabbage — it is a vegetable, after all.

To effectively shred cabbage, it requires the tiniest bit of prep. Using a sharp knife, cut the head in half. After removing the cabbage core, cut the head into quarters. This gives you a smaller, flat surface to make the shredding process easier. Simply run the peeler back and forth across the flat surface to get those veggie ribbons.

If you want even less prep work, you could follow the same steps but only cut the head in half and leave the core in place. For optimal results, start with the vegetable peeler at the top corner and make long, smooth strokes up and down to create a bounty of shredded goodness in seconds. It sure beats the freshness of a bag of premixed coleslaw!