Chopping a bell pepper is a notoriously tedious task – but not with this genius hack.

If you’ve ever had to prepare a fresh pepper, you’ll know how annoying it can be. If you just cut the vegetable in half, then you’ll need to spend an age knocking each half against your palm to get the seeds out, or painstakingly scooping them all out with a spoon or knife.

Alternatively, you can chop off the entire top of the pepper to get the green stem and the seeds inside out in one fell swoop. However, this ends up wasting so much of the delicious crunchy vegetable at the top that ends up in the bin.

But one woman has come up with the perfect hack to ensure you never need to worry about excessive wastage or pesky seeds – and it’s all to do with the way you chop your pepper.

Lori Conway posted a video to TikTok in which she shared the “game-changing” trick, and it quickly went viral with more than 13 million views and over 473,000 likes.

Taking one red bell pepper, Lori starts by cutting off the green stem from the top. However, she doesn’t cut the pepper itself at this stage and leaves the top intact. 

Removing the stem simply allows for a sturdy surface as Lori then flips the pepper upside down. Then, she simply uses the lines already present on the bottom of her pepper as her guide and cuts straight down along each line.

Lori’s pepper had three sections at the bottom, although some versions of the vegetable have four. All you need to do is cut your pepper according to however many little bumps your pepper has when you flip it over.

Once she’d made her cuts, Lori then simply pulled the sections apart to give herself three distinct chunks of pepper.

All the seeds were left in the middle section that she hadn’t cut, and because she’d done it from the bottom, there was hardly any pepper wasted in comparison to chopping it at the top instead.

With this method, you also get three – or four, depending on your pepper – strips that are easy to chop into smaller strips or dice it for use in cooking.

Commenters on the post were blown away by the trick. Some even pointed out that it’s the same hack Gordon Ramsay himself uses to chop his peppers with ease.

One person said: “I started doing this after I noticed it’s how Gordon Ramsay cuts his peppers.”

Another added: “This blew my mind!”

While a third stated: “I’ve seen this hack 101 times and still forget about it when I’m cutting a bell pepper.”