9 Essential Knife Skills To Master | Epicurious 101

Summary

Highlights

• Chef Frank introduces essential knife skills with a fun and informative approach 🔪.
• Learn the handshake grip for better control and less fatigue while cutting 🤲.
• Discover different cutting techniques from rough chop to chiffonade, each with its purpose 🍅.
• Understand the importance of a sharp knife for safety and efficiency 🗡️.
• Get tips on posture and hand placement for safer and more precise cuts 👐.
• Frank's engaging demonstration includes step-by-step instructions and visual aids 📏.

Key Takeaways

• A proper knife grip ensures control and safety in the kitchen 🔪.
• The handshake grip is essential for comfortable and effective cutting 🤝.
• Different cuts serve different culinary needs, from rough chops to fine juliennes 🥕.
• Sharp knives are safer and more efficient than dull ones 🔪.
• Proper posture and grip prevent fatigue and injury 💪.
• Practice is key to mastering knife skills and improving your culinary creations 🧑‍🍳.

Overview

9 Essential Knife Skills To Master | Epicurious 101 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hi I'm Frank I'm a professional chef and a culinary instructor and I'm going to show you the essential knife skills you need in the kitchen we will slice we will dice we'll shiff anad will Julien we might even Cube some stuff I'll be going over the knife skills you need to make restaurant quality dishes at home this is knife skills 101 having good knife skills is going to improve your cooking and it's not just for presentation you're going to waste less your food's going to cook more evenly and you're going to be safer in the kitchen the only way to get better at knife skills is to practice and today
• 00:30 - 01:00 I'm going to show you how to do that I'm going to turn everything on this tray into this the chef's knife is the most used tool in a professional kitchen and you need to know how to use it let's start with showing you how to properly hold a knife the most common grip is called the handshake grip so I'm going to shake hands with this knife I put it in my hand I wrap my fingers around and I grab the knife basically on the spine a lot of times when people are starting out in the kitchen they do the
• 01:00 - 01:30 old finger here people put the finger here thinking that it gives them control but eventually you're going to get really tired and being tired always leads to injury you look at the handshake grip and it gives you lots of Leverage lots of control so tuck that finger in regardless of what you choose a good grip is going to give you power control and safety now you know how to hold your knife but you have a whole other hand the other hand is what holds the thing you're cutting so you want to make sure that you keep those digits tucked in we call this the claw fingers
• 01:30 - 02:00 tucked in thumb tucked under the knife should always be resting on your longest knuckle whenever I stand in front of a cutting board I'm making sure that my shoulders are square to 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 really important when you're chopping and cutting and a lot of people will go on an angle this is how I cut but I always tell people when they start out try and turn just slight
• 02:00 - 02:30 so that the back of your spine is lined up with the cutting board so we have a 90° angle this allows you to start making accurate Cuts right everything's square one thing I want everyone to remember is that a Dull Knife is a dangerous knife you should start out with sharp knives and every few minutes maybe 10 minutes as you're cutting hone it over a steel if you want to know how to sharpen knives we did a whole video about that check it out so now that you know how to hold a knife I'm going to show you all the
• 02:30 - 03:00 different cuts that you're going to use the knife for the two most common Cuts in the kitchen are the high cut which is chopping and the low cut which is rocking the high Cut's usually for larger items whereas the low cuts for smaller finer cutting this cut is the chop or the rough chop it's used for when you just need a lot of vegetables in a short amount of time I have a peeled carrot here I almost always start by cutting the ends off anything that's round can be dangerous so what I like to do make a flat surface for that round
• 03:00 - 03:30 object usually the smaller the cut the shorter the cook so if 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 3 or 4 hours I cut a little bit larger you'll notice that I go from the high cut to the low cut high cut here and then I turn and I go to the low cut one thing you want to make sure is you're not feeding the material into the knife you're actually moving The Knife Down down the vegetable this cut is the dice
• 03:30 - 04:00 and what we want to do is take this butternut squash which is kind of weirdly shaped and make it into a nice Precision cut basically a cube whenever I use a Precision cut the presentation is what's important what I like to do is get my knife set in the top and kind of just tap it in and then I push down and through with that high cut I turn it around grip the squash really well make an incision give it a few Taps so that my knife is secure down and forward in
• 04:00 - 04:30 that high cut again this part of the squash I'm going to save for a rough chop you can almost never get a nice Precision cut with this don't throw it away save it but we're going to do Precision cut with the top part 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 knife to peel so I'm using it more like a saw because it's a very hard vegetable so now we're ready to dice whenever you do Precision Cuts you're going to have us able trim what I mean
• 04:30 - 05:00 by that is this piece might not give me some nice dice so I'm going to put that aside and use it for something else whenever I start to cut a dice I start out with a slab I like to line up the spine of my knife look straight down and cut all the way through I find that when people hesitate halfway through they get wonky slices so you want to line up cut down and through so I'm pushing down and pushing forward at this point you can
• 05:00 - 05:30 adjust you can see I'm a little wonky here so I can always adjust to get that slab really nice if you don't have square slabs you don't have square dice so then what I do is I line my knife up and I'm basically trying to get a 90° angle between my knife and the bottom of the slab you're going to have a lot of trim on these save it use it for soup once we get to that stick line it up cut down and through and you get a nice
• 05:30 - 06:00 large dice this cut is the slice and what we're looking for is a very thin even layer something you might put on a hamburger or on a sandwich tomatoes are round but they're easily gripped and what I like to do with a slice is hold it nice and tight when you cut I'm almost doing a little bit of a a slicing motion or a sawing motion so I get a really nice even thin slice going straight up and down I got a nice even slice and my knife basically Whispers
• 06:00 - 06:30 through that tomato I'm going to slice a red onion as well now if you want this to be a ring or flat and round like the Tomato you cut off both ends and you can peel the skin off what I'm going to do is something more for like a salad I cut it in half again that high cut I take the skin off if I cut it with the lines of the onion it's a Julien but if I cut it across the lines of the onion that's my slice down and through so it's more like a sawing motion than a chopping motion
• 06:30 - 07:00 this is going to give you nice half Moons instead of an IR regular cut that you're going to put onto your salad or sandwich how do you slice something that's really big and heavy like a watermelon this is how I do it I like to take both ends off if your knife is not long enough you can always just turn the watermelon down and through and then we're starting with a nice flat surface again I'm going to cut directly in half and again if my knife isn't long enough I'll cut one side give it a turn and cut the other side then once we have this we
• 07:00 - 07:30 can always turn it onto its flat side and again cut it so it's nice and even now you have a wedge and cut your slices this next cut is called a baton this shape is mainly used for garnish on a plate uh you might cut an apple for a salad in batons it's a match stick so basically what I'm doing for the Baton is I'm going to take the ends off and try and make them as Square as possible I'm going to stand my my potato
• 07:30 - 08:00 up and again continue to square things off so that I start off with a nice rectangular slab down and through at a 90° angle down and through at a 90° angle and now once we have our slabs we can cut into our batons I start at the tip and go through and down so that is our batons a lot of the cut that we do have the same technique it's just the end shape that we're changing the next cup we're going to do is a julienne which is a fine match stick normally
• 08:00 - 08:30 with a Julien I'm using it for a finished plated item something that is pretty it's a garnish it's another Precision cut that you're using so the food looks good in order to julen this pepper I'm going to take off both ends of the pepper and then I'm going to cut out the center part of the pepper cut it into a piece that's easily manageable I'm going to press down on my knife lightly and kind of saw away and any excess pepper so I have a nice thin
• 08:30 - 09:00 slab my hand a little bit in the way of the knife but I'm not going so fast that I'm going to slip and hurt myself again I'm holding my pepper with the claw and I'm just going down and through right so I'm not rocking I'm pushing this through so I have nice fine match sticks if you just kind of push down you're kind of crunching into it and crushing the the pepper not getting a nice even cut so this is this is the bias cut the bias
• 09:00 - 09:30 cut is basically a long shallow angle with small things like green onions it's usually a garnish and we want it to look really good with larger items like a carrot you're trying to make more surface area so that it Cooks evenly so with the bias cut on our scallions I usually offset them and then I'm going to cut the stem end off I'm using that same high cut that we use for Precision Cuts and push down and through you can adjust the thickness by moving your claw
• 09:30 - 10:00 hand in or out but you'll notice the knife is resting on my knuckle a good bias cut 20 to 40° you can make them longer and flatter if you want you can make them a little more shallow I usually go with about 45° make sure you have your protractor out when you do this chopping we're basically rocking the knife here we're sliding it through again if we chop this and go straight down we get a little more of a crushing sound we're not getting a really nice smooth edge on our cut this next cut is a min and a mince
• 10:00 - 10:30 is basically a rough Chop on a very small scale we're not really worried about getting a precise look to our product we just want to chop a lot of it in a quick amount of time when I start my mins I want to take the skin off and this isn't necessarily a cut but you'll see a lot of chefs do this you put your blade on top of the knife I always face my blade away just for safety give it a little tap and then the skin comes off fairly easily and then I just go in with that low cut or the rocking cut
• 10:30 - 11:00 minc one way and then I go the opposite way the pivot point of my knife is usually the tip of the knife I'm lifting the back and chopping down with the back of the knife if it gets caught on the blade wipe it off the blade and then chop the next cut is chiffonade and chiffonade is mainly used for garnishes and what that is is a very thin shred or a very thin thread of herbs the way that I do shiffon out is I pick a few leaves we're using basil
• 11:00 - 11:30 and then what I do is stack them up nice and flat and then we do a little bit of a roll into a nice bundle this not only makes the process go quicker you're getting even slices all the way through and here what's important is that we slice through and don't bruise the herb so having a sharp knife is important you're going to do that same high cut straight through if you just chop down on this you're going to get bruised and it's going to turn black and there is our chiffonade this next cut is the oblique cut it's
• 11:30 - 12:00 sometimes referred to as a rondelle or a roll cut we use the oblique cut to take something that's thick on one end and thin on the other and try and make the slices even and the way that I start this out is I cut the tip off here and then what I'm going to do is I'm going to roll it towards myself so that I can see the face of my cut go almost all the way down to the end of that cut and roll towards me see the face of my cut this is kind of like a rotating bias cut cut and you can see even though I'm getting
• 12:00 - 12:30 to the thicker spot on the carrot it's basically staying the same size as the thinner pieces and that is the oblique or the rondelle and there you have it that's the way to hold and handle a knife and many of the cuts that we use in professional kitchen I have a tool that if you're really serious about getting good at this it's a visual cut kit you can find these online it's a visual representation of most of the cuts practice as much as you can and you're going to get better at it
• 12:30 - 13:00 this cut is called the Kendall Jenner and here's why you should never cut like that she starts out by taking the cucumber and putting her hand over the cucumber and trying to cut like this basically what she's done is make herself blind to what she's cutting and that is super dangerous whenever you're cutting you should be able to see where the knife is and what you're cutting at all times swing it out use your claw now you can cut safely