Cutting Skills – Master Your Knife

 
Need some help with those knife skills? Our Food Editor Christine is here to save the day! 

Remember the ginger sesame slaw recipe? I specified cutting the vegetables up into thin strips. Since slaw is made mostly out of strands of shredded cabbage, I like the vegetables to be similar in size and texture so that nothing competes or overwhelms the other elements in the salad. This can also make cooking a stir fry much more successful; uniformly cut vegetables will all cook evenly so everything is perfectly cooked at the same time. 

Cutting a round or cylindrical vegetable into even pieces can be tricky. One way to avoid odd shaped pieces or pieces that are nothing but skin is this bias cut julienne technique. A cucumber is an easy vegetable to start with but you can also use this for carrots, zucchini, Asian eggplant,  or even potatoes for a French fry cut. Here’s how: 

DIRECTIONS

You will need a cutting board, a sharp chef’s knife, and a cucumber.

-Place the cucumber on the cutting board.

-Starting as close to the stem end as possible slice the cucumber on the bias at about a 60 degree angle making each slice as long as you can at that angle.

-Once you have 3 or 4 slices, stack the slices and line their edges up as neatly as you can.

-Repeat until the whole cucumber is sliced and stacked. Don’t try to do too many at    once, over stacking them can make the slices slide out as you cut.

-Cut straight down through the stack of cucumber slices into thin strips.  

Anyone can do it, just takes a little practice. Let us know if you have something specific you’d like to learn how to slice and dice. Now go get ’em!

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