Basic Knife Skills
Being able to wield a knife like a professional chef will save you a lot of time and money. It’s very thrifty to be able to prepare a healthy meal from scratch, in a short amount of time. The only way to achieve this thrifty feat is through solid knife skills.
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Sharp Knives: get the job done faster, saving you time and money
A wound from a dull knife will take longer to heal than one from a sharp knife. That in and of itself, is a good reason to use only the sharpest knives in your kitchen! Beyond quick healing, a sharp knife makes a huge difference in the amount of effort and time that is required to complete simple, but crucial, cooking tasks. Learn the simple sharpening techniques to keep your own knives razor-sharp.
Peeling: it’s not a big deal
Peeling vegetables like carrots and potatoes shouldn’t be thought of as a punishment. It’s got to be done if you’re going to cook from scratch, and it’s the sort of work that requires little or no thought. It’s as simple as it gets and if you have observed a thrifty, intelligent method once, you will never view the task as a chore and never ever complain about doing it again. Obverse in the video how every stroke butts up against the last--imagine cutting your grass. Would you cut 10 square feet in the northeastern corner of your yard, then move on down to the southwest and cut another little patch, then move into the centre and cut a bit more before moving onto the northwest for a figure eight pattern? No. Peeling vegetables efficiently, and saving time doing it, requires the same amount of skill and know how as does cutting the grass.
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Dicing: consistency is a cousin of thrift
Perfect dice are little cubes of vegetables or fruits which are ½ inch by ½ inch by ½ inch. Dicing can be done quickly and is widely used. A dice, however, will take longer to cook through since it’s larger than a brunoise (see below), and it can, therefore, be less thrifty because of the time that it takes on the stove. This means that dice should be used in dishes where the vegetables are cooked for a longer time, such as soup or stew.
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Chopping:
Chopping is the Howitzer missile of knife skills. Not too delicate or accurate, but it gets the job done. Chopping is for speed. It’s useful for preparing vegetables that will be used in a stock or perhaps slow roasted with a piece of meat, but chopping is not at all good for items that you intend to caramelize. The size is too big and the shape too irregular for quick, dry heat cooking. Further, scrap meats or fish carcasses can be chopped to rough but similarly sized pieces for use in stocks or sauces. You aren’t looking for precision; the most important thing is speed and getting the job done so that you can get onto the next task.
We refer to ‘chopped’ herbs when we describe herbs that have been cut into very, very fine pieces – chopped parsley, dill, and oregano.
Garlic is chopped if it’s being used in dishes where it will be cooked for a longer period of time, such as a meat sauce for pasta.
Slicing
More knife skills: slicing is straight and fast and rough – like chopping. You will use this technique often. The term is very over-arching: slicing bread, slicing cheese, slicing pickles, slicing meats, and slicing onions. Chopping, dicing, and brunoise require you to cut and then turn the food 90 degrees, then cut again, to achieve cube-shaped cuts. Slicing, like Julienne, is one directional cutting. Easy peasy, really quick, and very thrifty. Slice onions, carrots, red pepper, garlic, mushrooms, and pork tenderloin. Presto, you’ve prepped a stir fry for the family and it took you less than 5 minutes….it better only take 5 minutes! Slicing is super straight forward and easy to do. Really, it should be the foundation of every home cook’s knife skills.
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Chifonade
More exciting ways to cut your fingertips off!!! Just kidding. Remember, a day of skiing without falling is lame – you probably didn’t push yourself to try new things. If you cook, great food from scratch, you’re bound to cut or burn yourself once in a while. Don’t fear because ThriftCultureNow.com’s daily thrifty tips are going to present you with undeniably effective ways to doctor yourself. This may be the thriftiest thing you can do; to learn about health and wellness and how to be in control of healing yourself (note: if you do cut yourself, simply apply direct pressure, goldenseal cream, a bandage and watch the thing heal faster than you ever thought possible!) Okay, now back to how to chifonade:
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Chifonade is a technique where you slice delicate leaves, like basil and spinach, into very thin, hair-like strips. The result is light, soft, thin strips of the herb or green that are perfect for tossing into a dish such as pasta, right before it’s plated. The oils in the leaves (which are packed with flavor) will provide an aroma that your guests can’t resist when the plate hits the table.
Julienne
This technique sounds like the name of a French actress. Julienne is another technique that, through practice, will greatly improve your overall knife skills and allow you to present you dishes like a professional chef. First, make parallel cuts 3mm wide, of any solid vegetable: carrots, leek, beet, potato, etc. Take the ribbons that you have just cut and make parallel cuts 3 mm wide giving you a matchstick shaped piece of food which is 3mm by 3 mm by 2 inches.
Julienne vegetables are useful in a wide range of dishes: blanch carrots and leeks and serve atop poached salmon; potato julienne can be fried together to form mini potato pancakes; beets julienne can be pickled and served on salads. They look good and show that care has been taken in the preparation of the food. If you’re the homemaker, preparing meals for family and friends, know that you have a responsibility to nourish people properly and sufficiently – take it seriously and take pride in it!
Brunoise
Brunoise, like dice or julienne, is a style of cutting. Specifically, the dimensions of brunoise are about 3 mm by 3 mm by 3mm cubes. This is quite a small cut and it’s really an advanced technique for gourmet cooking in restaurant dishes. Is it necessary for home cooking? Not if survival is part of your definition of necessary. Perfect brunoise are certainly not required for your survival. So why even bother? Speed and skill with your knife will dramatically speed up your preparation and cooking times. If you can pump out all of your vegetable preparation and cooking, you can get on to other things. People avoid cooking and many things in life because they’re ‘not good at it.’ Well, how in the heck can you get good at something if you never attempt it? I love skiing and I laugh to hear people say, “I had a great day; I didn’t fall once.” Well, if you didn’t fall, and falling is your criteria for failure, then you did, I guess, have a perfect day. But, in looking at all the possibilities on the mountain, one can see many opportunities to fall. So, if you didn’t fall down, then you probably didn’t push yourself, didn’t try anything that was new and challenging. In cooking, brunoise is an excellent form of practice for knife skills, and if mastered, will offer you thrifty ways to turn dishes into more interesting and unique creations.
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Carrots, onions, celery, turnip, potatoes, beets, bacon, dry sausage, cheese….anything that you can get your knife through could be turned into a perfect little 3mm by 3mm by 3mm brunoise.
Start with carrots. Peel a carrot with your vegetable peeler. Cut the carrot in half lengthwise. Place the carrot flat side down on your cutting board. Square up the ends (cut a few millimeters off each end) so that you’re dealing with a four-sided figure. Slowly, make cuts perpendicular (90 degrees) to the ends and 3 mm apart. You will be left with 3mm thick strips (ribbons) of carrot. Place one strip flat on the cutting board and make perfect 3 mm wide cuts perpendicular to the end. You’re now left with 3mm by 3mm by a few inches julienne, like match sticks. Turn the julienne carrots 90 degrees and make cuts 3 mm apart all the way down the strips, leaving you with perfect 3mm by 3mm by 3mm brunoise.
The beautiful thing about brunoise is that you have increased the surface area of the food (vegetable or meat) dramatically. If you now take those carrot brunoise and sauté them, you can create a sugary sweet vegetable preparation that could be served in soup or on top of a piece of meat or fish, or in a pasta dish. Or, if you were to cut many different vegetables in the brunoise style, and sauté them one at a time but put them together at the end, then you would have a lovely vegetable dish that you could serve on its own.
The other great thing is that brunoise cooks very, very fast. So, if you can cut perfect brunoise, you can have a nutrient dense dish prepared on the stove in minutes – saving you time, energy, and electricity. Now that’s thrifty!
Carving
You’ve just cooked the most beautiful turkey that you and your family have ever seen. It’s Thanksgiving weekend and everyone is excited to eat this golden, crisp, juicy turkey that you cooked perfectly because you watched all of ThriftCultureNow’s ‘Thrifty Cooking’ videos many times and studied them diligently. It’s now time to carve the bird. Since you were the one who cooked it, everyone expects you to carve it. You begin to shave off pieces of the breast by cutting with the grain of the flesh – the meat begins to dry out the second it hits the plate. Your perfectly cooked turkey is a dried-out, chewy flop because you didn’t know how to carve properly.
You must slice cooked meats across the grain. If you cut with the grain, the meat will either dry out rapidly or be extremely chewy, or both – probably both. The leftovers will be tough and unwanted, and food waste isn’t thrifty.
First, learn to identify the direction in which the muscle fibers (like strands or stings of protein…like the disgusting cheese string you’re never going to buy and eat again) run. Let’s look at our turkey again – you may apply the same principles to chicken and duck. Carving a bird requires the same motions as butchering a bird: you cut both of the breasts off and set them aside, then pop the thigh bones out of their joints and cut along the rib cage, removing the legs. Cut the drumstick from the thigh, through the centre of the joint. Cut the wing off, through the joint where the wing meets the carcass. The carcass must be reserved for soup or stock. This is the beauty of buying whole birds – meat and stock. Now that you have the pieces removed from the frame, take the breast and lay it on the cutting board, parallel to the bottom of the board. You can see that the fibers are running right to left from the fat end of the breast to the thin tip of the breast. You are going to slice perpendicularly through the breast in ½ inch wide pieces. These pieces will retain their moisture and be very tender to cut and chew. Enjoy! The thighs, like in butchering the bird, can have the flesh cut from the bone, making them more pleasant for cutting and eating –put the bones in the same pot as your chicken carcass for soup or stock. Flip each thigh onto its back and, with your finger, feel out the bone running through the centre of the thigh. With your knife, cut along the bone on each side. Pinch the bone and pull it from the flesh. Gently cut around the back side of the bone and remove it from the flesh – put it in the pot for soup.
Red meat and pork are shaped differently than poultry, but the same principles apply for carving. Follow the muscle fibers and cut across them. These (RED MEAT) animals have a lot in common; their muscles are similarly shaped. Some of the premium cuts are very easy to identify because they have only one or two muscles: beef tenderloin, strip loin, or rib eye, and pork rack, loin or tenderloin. With all of these cuts, the muscle fibers run from one end to the other and, thus need to be cut across the tube into steaks or chops, or if cooked, into tender slices of meat.
Many cheaper cuts are more complicated to carve because they have many muscles running in different directions. Cutting in one direction will result in pieces that are inconsistent in their texture– some tender and some chewy. Cheaper cuts can be excellent if you know how to carve them. Pork shoulder, for example, is outstanding when slow roasted or smoked. Lamb shoulder, beef eye of round are much cheaper than premium cuts, and if cooked and carved correctly, will be well received by friends and family. Identify which direction the major muscle group is moving. Pork shoulder, for example, is shaped like a big block. Look closely at the side of the shoulder and find the side that displays many fibers running right to left. Place this side parallel to the bottom of your cutting board and slice across the grain.
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