I once worked in a restaurant where one of my duties was to prepare the Sunday brunch fruit platters. That meant peeling a lot of fruit, especially melons. Here’s the quick and efficient method I used for peeling those melons. Use it whenever you want a whole peeled melon for slicing or cutting into cubes—as for the refreshing melon lemonade at right. And don’t forget to wash the outside of the melon in water before peeling: Bacteria sometimes like to hang out on melon skin and can be dragged into the melon flesh by your knife as you peel off the skin.

Begin by cutting off the melon’s top and bottom ends. Next, stand the melon on one of the cut ends and slice off the remaining skin in strips, taking care to hug the curves so that you’re trimming only the skin and not the-flesh. A flexible knife works well for this. Cut the melon in half, scoop out the seeds, and then cut up the flesh as you like.