Peaches are in season right now, and like a lot of fresh fruit in Japan, they’re considered a seasonal delicacy, a bit of a luxury item. So when people buy peaches in Japan, they almost always cut them into slices, so that they can be savored piece by piece or shared with family members or houseguests. However, if you’re cutting up a peach, you’ve got to deal with the pit.
You need to be careful with your knife, because you want to get as much edible fruit as you can in each slice without getting any pit scrapings mixed in with what you’re going to be eating. And as you’re making all the little cut necessary to do that, and changing your grip on the fruit to get at it from different angles, the more likely you are to bruise and squash parts of the fruit. But it turns out the Japan Agricultural Cooperatives Group’s National Federation of Agricultural Cooperative Associations, which also goes by the thoughtfully concise alternative name of Zen-Noh, has a peachy keen peach-pitting life hack to share with us all, which it recently posted to its official Twitter account and requires only two cuts to cleanly remove the pit entirely.
Instead of a knife, Zen-Noh says to use a pair of kitchen shears. Stick them into the peach along the indentation in the skin, and move the shears back and forth just a bit to lengthen the cut. Next, repeat this process to make another incision that crosses the first at a 90-degree angle.
Basically, you want to cut an X into the peach, and i.
