9 Essential Knife Skills To Master | Epicurious 101

Hi, I'm Frank, I'm a professional chef and culinary instructor and I'll show you the

essential

knife

skills

you need in the kitchen. We'll slice, dice, julienne, and we might even dice. A few things I'll go over the

knife

skills

you need to prepare restaurant-quality dishes at home. This is knife skills 101. Having good knife skills will improve your cooking and it's not just for presentation, you'll waste less, your food will cook more evenly and you'll be safer in the kitchen. The only way to improve your knife skills is to practice and today I will show you how to do it.

I'm going to turn everything on. This tray in this chef's knife is the most used tool in a professional kitchen and you need to know how to use it abroad. Let's start by showing you how to properly hold a knife. The most common grip is called a handshake grip, so I'm going to shake hands with this knife. I put it in my hand. I wrap my fingers around and grab the knife basically by the spine. A lot of times when people start in the kitchen, they do the old finger here. People put their finger here. Thinking it gives them control, but eventually you will get very tired and being tired always leads to injuries.

You look at the grip of the handshake and it gives you a lot of control. It takes advantage of a lot of control, so stick that finger in no matter what you choose. A good grip will give you power control and safety. Now you know how to hold the knife, but you have another hand. The other hand is the one holding what you're cutting, so you want to make sure to keep those digits hidden. In what we call this, the claw fingers tucked into the thumb tucked under the knife should always rest on the longer knuckle whenever I stand in front of a cutting board.

I make sure my shoulders are aligned with the cutting board. I bend my knees slightly. because you don't want to stand with a stiff back. I see a lot of people doing this, the hunch, don't do the hunch. Good posture is very important when you are cutting and cutting, and many people will bend over. This is how I cut, but I always tell people when they start, try to turn slightly so that the back of the spine is lined up with the cutting board, so that we have a 90 degree angle, which will allow you start making precise cuts.

One thing I want everyone to remember is that a dull knife is a dangerous knife. You should start with sharp knives and every few minutes, maybe 10 minutes while cutting, sharpen it on a steel if you want to know how to sharpen knives. We made a whole video about it. Check it. Now that you know how to hold the knife, I'll show you all the different cuts you'll use the knife for. The two most common cuts in cooking are the high cut which is for chopping and the low cut which is for balancing the high cuts generally for larger items while the low cuts for smaller and finer cuts, this cut is the minced or the coarse chopping used when you just need a lot of vegetables in a In no time I have a peeled carrot here.

I almost always start by cutting the ends off anything that is round, it can be dangerous so what I like to do is make a flat surface for that round object, usually the smaller the cut the shorter the cooking time, so yes I'm going to use this for a sauce that cooks for about an hour. I'll cut it small. If I'm going to use this for a sauce that cooks for three or four hours, I cut it a little larger, you'll notice. that I go from the high cut to the low cut high cut here and then I turn and go to the low cut one thing you want to make sure is that you are not feeding the material into the knife, you are actually moving the knife Underneath the vegetable, this cut is the dice and what we want to do is take this somewhat oddly shaped pumpkin and turn it into a nice precision cut, basically a cube.

Whenever I use a precision cut, it's all about the presentation. What I like What I do is put my knife on top and just hit it and then push down and through with that high cut. I turn around and grab the pumpkin very well. I make an incision and tap it a few times to secure my knife. down and forward and that high cut again this part of the pumpkin I'm going to save for a thick cut you can almost never get a good Precision cup with this don't throw it away save it but we're going to do Precision cut with the top of the squash, you can use a peeler for this, but I find it really inefficient, so what I like to do is get on a flat surface and use my peeling knife, so I use it more like a saw because it's a very vegetable. lasts, so now we're ready to dice.

Every time you make precision cuts, you will have usable cuts. What I mean by this is that this piece may not give me good cubes, so I'm going to leave that aside. and I use it for something else every time I start cutting a die. I start with a slab. I like to line up the spine of my knife. I look down and cut completely. I find that when people hesitate halfway through, they get crooked cuts. so you want to line up cut down and across so I'm pushing down and pushing forward at this point you can adjust you can see I'm a little unstable here so I can always adjust so that slab is really nice if not you do.

You don't have square slabs, you don't have square dice, so what I do is I line up my knife and I'm basically trying to get a 90 degree angle between my knife and the bottom of the slab. lots of scraps on these, save it, use it for soup once we get to that stick, line it up, cut it down and you've got yourself some nice big dice. This cut is the slice and what we are looking for is a very thin uniform layer. You can put them on a burger or sandwich. The tomatoes are round but they grip easily and what I like to do with a slice is hold it nice and tight when when you cut I'm almost making a little cutting motion. or a sawing motion to get a really nice thin slice that goes up and down.

I got a nice even slice and my knife basically whispers through that tomato. I'm also going to cut a red onion now if you want this to be a ring or flat and round like the tomato you cut both ends and you can remove the skin what I'm going to do is something else for like a salad I cut it in half another Maybe that high cut I take the skin off if I cut it with the julienne lines of the onion, but if I cut it along the lines of the onion, that's my cut down and across, so it's more like a sawing motion rather than cutting, this will give you beautiful half moons. of a jagged cut that you are going to put on your salad or sandwich how to cut something that is very big and heavy like a watermelon this is how I do it I like to remove both ends if your knife is not long enough you can always just turn the watermelon upside down down and then we'll start with a nice flat surface again.

I'm going to cut straight down the middle and again, if my knife isn't long enough, I'll cut one side, turn it around and cut. the other side, once we have it we can always turn it over onto its flat side and cut it again so it looks nice and even now you have a wedge and you cut the slices. The next cut is called a cane. This shape is mainly used for decoration. on a plate, you can cut an apple for a salad into sticks, it's a matchstick, so basically what I'm doing with the stick is taking the ends off and trying to make them as square as possible.

I'm going to stop. My dad up and again continue squaring things up to start with a nice rectangular slab bottom down at a 90 degree angle and now once we have our slabs we can cut our canes. Start at the tip and work your way down, so those are our poles. Much of the custom, we have the same technique, it's just the final shape we're changing. The next cup we're going to make is a julienne, which is a fine match usually with julienne. I'm using it for a plated finished item. Something that's pretty is a garnish. It's another precision cut that you're using to make the food look good for to be able to julienne this pepper I'm going to remove both ends of the pepper and then I'm going to cut the middle part of the pepper, I'm going to cut it into a piece that's easily manageable.

I'm going to press my knife lightly and cut off the excess pepper so I have a nice thin slab my hands a little bit in the shape of the knife but I'm not going so fast that I slip and hurt myself again I'm holding my pepper with my claw and I'm just falling and across to the right, so I'm not rocking, I'm pushing this in to get nice thin matchsticks, if you just push down, you're kind of squishing and squishing the pepper without getting a nice, even cut, so this is the al cut. Bias The bias cut is basically a long, shallow angle with small things like green onions.

It's usually a garnish and we want it to look great with larger items like a carrot. You're trying to make more surface area so it cooks evenly. So with the bias cut on our chives, I usually offset them and then I'm going to cut off the end of the stem. I'm using the same high cut that we use for the precision cuts and push down and through, you can adjust the thickness by moving it around. your hand claws in or out, but you'll notice the knife resting on my knuckle. A good 20 to 40 degree bias cut. You can make them longer and flatter if you want.

You can make them a little more superficial. I normally use about 45 degrees, make sure you have the protractor out when you make this cut, we're basically moving the knife here, slide it back in, if we cut this and go down, we get a little bit more of a squishing sound that we're not hearing. a very nice smooth edge on our cut, the next cut is a ground beef and a ground beef is basically a rough cut on a very small scale, we're not really worried about giving a precise look to our product, we just want to cut a lot.

In a short time, when I start preparing my mints, I want to remove the skin and this is not necessarily a cut, but you will see that a lot of chefs do this, you put the blade on top of the knife, I always look at myself. I removed the blade just for safety, I will I give a little swipe and then the skin comes off pretty easily and then I just go in with that low cut or the swing cut in one direction and then I go the opposite direction, the pivot point of my knife is usually the tip of the knife I'm lifting the back and cutting with the back of the knife if it gets caught on the blade, clean it off the blade and then chop the next cut is chiffon and chiffon is mainly used for garnishes and what that This is a very thin piece or a very fine thread of herbs.

The way I make chiffonade is I pick some leaves, we use basil and then what I do is stack them nice and flat and then we make a little bit of a roll into a nice bundle, this not only makes the process quicker but You also get uniform slices every time and the important thing here is that we cut and not bruise the grass, so it is important to have a sharp knife. I'm going to do the same high cut directly, if you just cut this, you're going to hurt yourself and it's going to turn black and there's our gauze.

The next cut is the oblique cut, sometimes known as a rondelle or roll. To cut we use the oblique cut to take something that is thick on one end and thin on the other and we try to make the slices even and the way I start this is by cutting off the tip here and then what I'm going to do. Am I going to turn it towards me so I can see the face of my cut? Get almost to the end of that cut and turn towards me to see the face of my cut. This is like a rotating bias. cut and you can see that even though I'm getting to the thickest part of the carrot, it basically stays the same size as the thinner pieces and that's the oblique or the rondelle and there you have it, that's how you hold and handle a knife . and many of the cuts we use in the professional kitchen.

I have a tool that, if you really want to get good at this, is a visual cutting kit. You can find them online. It is a visual representation of most cuts. Practice as much as you can and you will get better at it. This cut is called Kendall Jenner and here's why you should never cut like this. She starts by taking the cucumber, putting her hand on the cucumber and trying to cut it like that, basically what she's done is become blind to what she's cutting and that's super dangerous. Every time you cut, you should be able to see where the knife is and what you are cutting at all times.

Shake it, use your claw, now you can safely cut.