A Simple Trick for De-Stemming Your Strawberries

Whether you prefer buying them from the farmers' market or picking them from the field yourself, summer is the best time to bring home strawberries. The fruits taste delicious on their own, but if you want to add them to a recipe like a cake or pie, they require a little prep work. De-stemming strawberries may seem intimidating, but that shouldn't discourage you from taking full advantage of all strawberry season has to offer. If you have a simple tool at home, you're just a minute or two away from a batch of perfectly hulled strawberries.

According to Lifehacker, all you need to remove the stem and core from a strawberry is a plastic drinking straw. Starting at the tip of the fruit, push the straw through the strawberry lengthwise until it pierces through the top, pushing out the stem in process. Slide out the straw to admire your perfectly cored, stemless strawberry. Now that it's been hulled, you can add it to smoothies, fruit salads, baked goods, or any other dish that calls for it.

Hulling strawberries with a knife instead of a straw can be dangerous, which is why many people opt to chop off the entire top portion. This method gets rid of the leafy stem, but it also wastes a lot of perfectly edible fruit. Buy hulling it, you get a clean, ready-to-eat product while preserving as much of the strawberry as possible.

Strawberries aren't the only foods that can benefit from a handy life hack. Here are some more things you've been eating all wrong (and the right ways to devour them).