Knives
Good knife skills are what separate the good-enough from the great.
This was a humbling week.
Remember, the current format of this blog is to chronicle my weekly culinary school classes. And at the moment, those classes are focusing very much on the fundamentals.
By fundamentals, I mean first steps, and the first steps of anything are the most critical. They’re often where the line between success and failure is found. So it’s no accident that the first steps taught in culinary school are the same first steps taken when cooking a meal — knife skills.
Let’s pull that thread a bit…
If you improperly cut your ingredients before cooking them, odds are you’ll wind up with a result other than what you expected. And if you cut your ingredients wrong, the likely culprit is in how you prepared your ingredients for cutting in the first place.
For most of us home cooks, dicing to a degree of accuracy is good enough. Roughly the same size/shape serves our purpose. But I didn’t invest thousands of dollars in culinary school to be just good enough.
With any pursuit of mastery, the key to reaching next-level ability usually starts somewhere in the mundane beginnings… the foundational steps that most overlook or ignore for want of getting to “the good stuff.”
So taking the time to cut a few pounds of perfect quarter-inch diced carrots is what separates the good enough from the perfect. And this is a blog about the perfect.
Let me back up…
Our task this week was to learn and practice the most common knife cuts, listed below (roughly in order of size):
Fine Brunoise: 1/16 cube
Brunoise: 1/8 cube
Small Dice: 1/4 cube
Medium Dice: 1/2 cube
Large Dice: 3/4 cube
Julienne: 1/8 x 1/8 x 2” matchsticks
Batonnets: 2” sticks of the size dice to prepare (ie: ¼ vs ½)
Eminee: 1/8 slice of onion half cut down the equator (ie: sliced)
Supreme: pithless, seedless section of citrus.
Concasse: small diced, peeled, seeded tomato
Chiffonade: ribbons of herb. Literally “made of rags”
Our first task was to small dice carrots, onions, and celery. Small dice again is a quarter inch. Now, dicing vegetables takes several steps. First, you “square off” the product, which means cutting it into flat, pieces that can be cut without rolling. From there, depending on the vegetable, you cut it into batonnets, basically “sticks” the height of the final dice (i.e.: ¼ or ½ inch). These batonnets you then cut into the cube of the final dice.
Here’s a pretty good source of how-to videos for basic knife skills and cutting. If you wondering why I’m not making videos myself:
I don’t have the gear
I don’t have the talent (I’m still just a student, remember?)
There’s already plenty of knife skills content out there, I don’t need to pile on that heap, so I’d rather just point you to the better ones rather than leave to you sort through a load of clickbait Google results.
In this, I fell far short. I thought I was good at knife skills. Knife skills was the first cooking class I ever took 20 years ago, and for nearly 20 years it was the only class I ever took until recently.
But this week I learned that there’s a big difference between conceptually knowing how to dice and onion, vs doing it with precision and consistency. Remember those words — Precision and Consistency.
Getting the fundamentals right is critical to learning anything new. But it’s also just as critical when trying to improve something you already have some experience in. In fact it’s harder.
When I was a ski instructor, it was always easier to teach total beginners because you could build those fundamentals from scratch. Trying to teach intermediate skiers advanced techniques was much harder, usually because they had years worth of bad habits ingrained as muscle memory that needed to be broken down and rebuild.
This week, I was that intermediate skier riddled with bad habits. My quarter inch dice was closer to half-inch dice and everywhere between, even using a Culinary Ruler the whole time to check my proportions. And even though I made a point of trying to cut smaller, I just kept on fucking it up, over and over again.
So the next day, I spent some time at home working on carrots, and had a revelation. I discovered my error wasn’t so much in the final dicing, but in the initial steps of preparing the product for dicing where I went wrong — the initial batonnet. They were too big, which caused a cascade of mistakes in every step after.
Determined to train my eyes to recognize what a quarter inch cube looked like by sight, I spent an hour or so focused on making perfect batonnets before proceeding with the rest of the dice.
I even pushed each batonnet through the quarter inch hole in my Culinary Ruler, and re-cut them to fit when necessary (which at first was nearly every one… there were a lot of F-bombs in the house that day).
Once I had a pile of correctly sized batonnets, I started to get an eye for what the size looked like, and the batonnets started passing through the ¼-inch cube hole with ease. From there, cutting them into the correct sized cubes was easy.
Why would I do this? Besides it being on our practical test in a few weeks, there are several reasons why taking the time to learn good knife skills is important:
Safety: Knives are sharp and meant to cut things. Preferably not you.
Uniformity: The size of your food affects the time it takes to cook, so uniformity of size = uniformity of cooking time.
Efficiency: Read: speed. That doesn’t necessarily mean fast slices, but efficient methods of cutting that even when performed slowly is quicker than rapidly hacking away.
Presentation: Looks like you know what you’re doing.
During class, Chef Zach added another interesting reason that got me thinking… professional pride. I didn’t take that as arrogance, but rather of a sign of care and dedication. Cutting and prepping ingredients well is the mark of a good chef. We can all cut. Some of us can even cut fast. But cutting precisely with consistency AND fast is what separates the great from the good.
The Takeaway:
Practice with precision, not speed. It’s like learning how to pronounce a new, long, complicated word… you sort of have to sound out each syllable and get the right before you try to combine it into something understandable.
Take an hour just to dice up a few quarts worth of Mirepoix (onions, carrots, celery) and save it for a future use. Think of it as meal prep. Diced ‘Poix will keep for weeks in the fridge (just keep the onions separate). Or you can give it a quick saute and then freeze it. Or you can caramelize it real soft and save it almost like a paste (which keeps for months).
See below for a practical application. But first… the hail of bullets:
A note on types of knives:
Chef Knife: the 12” workhorse is the main kitchen tool you’ll use
Boning Knife: great for breaking down and carving chicken, fish, etc. (I mean… gamechanger).
Serrated: only for cutting bread and cakes. Not for tomatoes!
Paring: a mini version of the chef knife good for detailed work (Supremes for instance)
Cleaver (optional): good for cutting through large, thick vegetables like butternut squash. Plus they look fucking cool.
Anything else is a waste of space/money
A note on sharpening:
Keep your knives sharp! Skip the motored knife sharpeners and get a whetstone, then learn how to use it. Another good option is the laser-guided knife sharpening machine that hardware stores like Ace have started offering. Get it done every few months.
Use a honing steel. This doesn’t sharpen the knife, but rather straightens it. A quick 5-6 swipes on each side of the knife before EVERY use and you’r knife will stay sharp longer.
A note on cutting boards:
Wood it best for most cutting. I like Boos. Be sure to keep it oiled, etc. per instructions so it doesn’t warp. Buy one larger than you think you’ll need… you’ll be happier for it.
Plastic is good for breaking down raw chicken, fish, meat. Again… go bigger and thicker.
Application: Ratatouille
This is a great way to practice lots of different knife cuts and get a meal out of it in the end.
We’re not talking about the ratatouille you saw the rat make in the movie. Technically that’s a tian, and you’d likely use a mandoline for that.
This is the original, rustic ratatouille that originated in France from farmers throwing whatever leftover product they didn’t sell at market into a communal pot.
Technique wise, it involves cutting different types of vegetables into different sizes, and cooking each individually so they maintain their individual flavors and texture. The tomatoes added as the last step simply marries all the flavors together as a sort of base.
It makes a highly versatile side dish for chicken or fish, or as a main served over rice if you like. It can be served hot, or cold, and it keeps for days (in fact, likely even better the day after made).
Ingredients:
¼ inch dice ‘poix (about 2 cups total)
¾ inch dice eggplant (about a pound)
½ inch dice squash (about a pound)
¼ inch dice bell pepper (2 cups)
1.5 cup concasse tomato (see note)
3 garlic cloves, ground into paste (DON’T use a garlic press!)
2 tbl Chiffonade basil
(Note: It’s January, and I never buy tomatoes in winter b/c they suck. So knife skills aside, it’s likely better to use quality canned diced tomatoes instead this time of year).
Process:
In a large dutch oven, saute the eggplant first in plenty of oil over high heat (eggplant sucks up oil like mushrooms. Use twice as much as you would for other vegetables). Don’t salt (same reason). Remove once browned and slightly soft.
Add squash, brown and lightly salt. Remove when soft.
Add bell pepper, same as above. Remove
Add ‘poix. Salt and sweat until soft
Add all the previously browned ingredients back to the post w the ‘poix, stir to combine, then add tomatoes and stir to combine again, being sure to scrape up browned bits (fond) from the bottom of the pot.
Add pasted garlic. Stir. Taste and season as necessary.
Add basil. Stir.
Serve or store
The entire process — cutting to cooking — took me about an hour. I next want to explore making one using winter vegetables to stay seasonal, but that’s another post.
Until next week…