Chef Reveals an Effortless Garlic Chopping Hack With Just a Knife and the Result Is Impressive

You strip away its papery skin. It feels challenging because the skin cracks and breaks too soon. Even when you succeed in flaying the skin of one clove, you don’t seem excited because there are dozens of cloves still tucked into the rounded cluster of this silvery-white vegetable. Cloaked in the crispy peel, the cloves of garlic sit inside the papyraceous lining, probably waiting for a warrior to accomplish the most Sisyphean kitchen task. It’s not done yet. There’s yet another catch. Even when the warrior has peeled away all the cloves and laid them out neat on a plate, there’s yet another obstacle standing in their path before they can cook their favorite bowl of macaroni. The obstacle is chopping garlic.

The moment you approach cloves with the knife’s blade, the cloves start to slip and scatter, owing to their silky skin. You are about to give up, but then you see the video of French chef Carl (@carl.is.cooking) popping in your TikTok feed. Job’s done! In this video, which has been viewed more than 4 million times, Carl shared a surprisingly simple technique to chop garlic without getting annoyed by the slippery garlic cloves. As the short clip opens, the chef holds a raw, unpeeled garlic on the camera. Then shows a large knife. 

Explaining the method he uses to chop garlic, he advised the viewers not to use the sharp end of the blade. Rather, he opted for the blunt edge. He dug the blunt edge of the knife into a big clove and started rocking it back and forth effortlessly. The chopped bits of garlic collected in a tiny mound on the wooden chopping board below. “Perfect,” a voice exclaimed in the video background. “I always cut like this. You?” The chef asked his viewers in the caption. The simple trick made thousands of people fans who jumped into the comments to express their amazement. 

“When I tell you my jaw dropped,” exclaimed @sophiehenderson3. @bianca quipped, “Don’t let Kendall Jenner see this!” @laurenmehalic called it a “witchcraft” trick. @rosethepainter said, “This better work because I’m about to make a lasagna and use this game changer.” @gottalovelili__ wrote, “I refuse to believe this can’t be real.” Another person said, “I’m so serious I think I might write a thesis on how useful TikTok has been to me since downloading.”

Unbeknownst to Carl, one of his viewers was Meels (@hellomeels), a meal delivery company. Meels’s chef initially refused to believe that the simple trick would even work. “There’s no way,” he said, but still proceeded to try the hack. "Okay, so instead of using the blade, we're going to use the back of the knife. Here we go," he said. As he tried the clever chopping hack, he was stupefied to realize that it worked like magic. “And why didn’t I know about this earlier?” the man exclaimed in a TikTok video. “Never chopping garlic the same way ever again,” Meels captioned the video. Though some people were still skeptical of the trick, most of them seemed to resonate.

You can follow Carl (@carl.is.cooking) and Meels (@hellomeels) on TikTok for cooking and kitchen hacks.