5/6/11

Mediums to Use When Practicing Knife Skills

    • Practicing knife skills keeps you safe in the kitchen. knife image by dethchimo from Fotolia.com

      Put your food processor away and improve your cooking by mastering knife skills. Food cooks more evenly when it's cut properly, which makes dishes taste better. Plus, using proper cutting techniques with the aid of a sharp knife enables you to prepare dishes faster. Practice basic cutting techniques when following simple recipes, such as salads, side dishes and sauces. Use certain foods as mediums to hone your skills.

    Chicken

    • Chicken is an inexpensive meat used in a variety of dishes. Preparing chicken salad offers a chance to perfect your knife skills with dicing. Dicing is a preparation that involves cutting food into cubes. Cut a breast of boneless chicken into a large 3/4-inch dice to prevent the chicken salad from becoming soggy when mixed with dressing. Using boneless chicken as opposed to bone-in chicken enables you to concentrate on making even knife cuts.

    Vegetables

    • Create a vegetable sauté to accompany your main dinner course. Cut vegetables, like carrots, squash, asparagus, peppers and zucchini into julienne slices. A julienne cut includes cutting vegetables into 1-inch long and 1/8-inch wide uniform stripes. Julienne knife cuts allow different vegetables of various textures to cook evenly in a pan set at the same cooking temperature and time.

    Garlic, Shallots, Onions and Herbs

    • Garlic, shallots and onions are ideal mediums for practice mincing, because of their strong flavors. Mincing involves finely chopping food into very small, consistent pieces. Since most recipes call for the addition of fresh herbs, it presents another opportunity to practice this cutting technique. Finely chop or mince herbs, such as thyme, rosemary and parsley and add to a sauce or dressing.

    Potatoes

    • Use potatoes to practice all sorts of knife cuts. Potatoes make a cheap medium for practicing knife skills without a specific recipe in mind. Their starchy consistency lends them to various cutting techniques, such as slicing, dicing and cubing and even a turned cut (tourney) that involves a 7-sided shaped cut.

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