The 3 Knife Skills Everyone Should Know _ Techniquely With Lan Lam

I have a little story for you. Back when I was first starting out in the kitchen, my chef was making a risotto and she asked me to brunoise some onions. And a brunoise is just a micro dice of onion, pretty simple. I didn't have my own knives back then. And so I was working with a knife that the kitchen supplied. It was big, it was bulky. I spent maybe 20 minutes perfectly dicing an onion. And she came back, she thanked me for my work, asked me to do something else. I come back three minutes later, she had perfectly brunoised her own onion because mine, they were going into staff meal. They weren't good enough. And I knew at that moment, I needed to develop better knife skills. Having great knife skills isn't just for chefs and it's not just about pretty food. Although the attitude with your eyes exists for good reason. As you get more comfortable wielding a knife, cooking takes less time, there's less food waste. When you have to prepare a large meal, it's less intimidating. And best of all, you don't worry about hurting yourself in the kitchen. I'm using a chef's knife in this video, but the techniques we'll be talking about, they can be applied to other knives as well. That being said, if you're only gonna own one knife, I think it has to be a chef's knife. As we go through this, there are two things to keep in mind. First, you need a sharp knife. A sharp knife offers control, precision, accuracy. It's just critical. Now, if you wanna see a video about knife care, let me know in the comments. Second, there's no one way to do knife work. And these are just techniques I've learned over the years that really worked for me. My default grip for pretty much all knife work is a pinch grip. You use your thumb and forefinger to grab the knife just above the handle. The rest of your fingers wrap around. This hold kind of gives me a nice balance between precision and power. Now, when I'm holding a knife, I want it to be an extension of my arm. I imagine a line that runs from my shoulder, through my wrist, through all the way to the tip of the blade. This is just ergonomically a lot more comfortable. It's really important if you're doing a lot of knife work. I don't wanna see any of this action, this twisting of the wrist. It's not great. And if I need to change the angle of my cuts, it's my shoulder that's rotating and doing the work rather than my wrist. Now, what about my offhand and the food? I've seen a lot of cooking videos where the food is set up right on the center of the board. The knife is at a right angle. You see a lot of right angles in these videos, and they're really aesthetically pleasing. But if you zoom out, you'll notice that my arm is kind of jacked up really high in order to hold onto the food. My wrist isn't quite as straight as I'd want it to be. I'm standing at a weird angle to make all of this work. It's not how you really work in a kitchen. You really wanna make use of your board, and sometimes centering the food isn't right. Cutting at right angles isn't necessary. What you want is for your arms to be in a comfortable position. My elbow isn't jacked up anymore. I'm not reaching forward unnecessarily. Everything is just more natural and comfortable. And finally, I wanna make sure I'm tucking my fingertips. It keeps them away from the blade of the knife so I won't hurt myself, but it's actually really useful for other reasons that we'll see shortly. So for slicing, I wanna be using kind of the back half or a third of my knife, and rather than pushing straight down, which can compress the food and damage it, it also requires a lot more pressure. I wanna use my entire arm for this motion, and I want to push the knife forward and down. And that diagonal motion makes my knife feel really sharp. It doesn't require as much force. It doesn't compress the food, and it's just really, really effective. You can actually hear the difference in the amount of pressure required when you're using the wrong cut. It sounds aggressive. You can hear the vegetable crunching. Not great. What you wanna hear instead is something more like this. If we were to zoom in on this blade, you'd notice that it's actually not perfectly smooth. There are micro serrations on there, and this pushing motion really makes use of them. As I'm doing this knife work, my fingertips are tucked, and my blade is actually resting on my knuckles. They act as a guide to help me be a little bit more precise as I slice. You don't have to use a push cut. You could also use a pull cut where you're drawing the knife back. I find that this back slicing or this pull cut is really great for really delicate foods. It puts very little pressure straight down. There's very little compression. You can hear it's almost silent. Not the easiest one to master, but worth learning after you've mastered a push cut. Now let's build on what we know about slicing for another cut, dicing. Dicing foods is pretty straightforward. You're using either a push or pull cut to first make slices of whatever it is you're dicing. You take those slices and you cut them into strips, and then you rotate those strips and cut them into small pieces. Really, the only thing you're thinking about is how much waste is acceptable and how uniform do those pieces need to be. If you're after uniformity, you're gonna wanna do what's taught at culinary schools where edges are squared off. You have a little bit more waste, but in exchange, your dice is perfectly uniform and every piece is identical. For a quicker and less wasteful approach, you can skip squaring off those edges. You still end up with a uniformity of size, if not of shape, and that's perfectly fine for day-to-day cooking. It's kind of what I expect when I'm writing recipes for other folks, and it's what I do when I'm cooking at home. If you're dicing an onion, a shallot, some fennel, the method is gonna be a little bit different, and this is a great opportunity to build on the skills we've just learned. Let me show you how I dice onions. I like to cut the onion in half through the root. That root holds the petals together. When you dice an onion, because you can't rearrange the pieces and stack them, what you're doing instead is making a series of horizontal and vertical cuts. I like to do the horizontal cuts first. I find that if I've done the vertical cuts first, I have a hard time holding everything together to come back across the other way. The mistake I see a lot of beginners make when they do this is they push the knife straight back towards the root end, and when you're doing it that way, you're not making use of those micro serrations along the blade. I think it's much more efficient to draw the blade back and at an angle. That diagonal motion means that you don't have to apply as much pressure when you're cutting, which is great. You don't wanna push down with a ton of pressure on the onion. You really only need to keep the onion from moving around. If you push too hard, it can be difficult to force the knife through the onion as you're cutting. The other thing to keep in mind is to keep your fingers out of the way. I've seen people kind of use their palm and they kind of flex their fingers up. That works. You can also just place your fingers on top. After the horizontal cuts are done, I'll move on to the vertical cuts. The first thing I do is actually rotate the onion so that my arm isn't jacked up at some weird angle. Rather than this pinch grip, I might move my finger to the spine of the blade, and what this does is it gives me more control of the placement of the tip. That can be really useful if I've got an especially long knife or a heavy knife that I'm unfamiliar with, or if I'm trying to space the cuts really close to each other. That extra level of precision moving your finger gives is really nice. For these cuts, I just place the knife down and you can either push straight down or you can draw the knife back. It's kind of up to you. Once those are made, you just come back across and it's another push, or if you want, a pull cut. All right, we've covered slicing and dicing. Let's take it a step further and talk about mincing. A mince is simply a really fine chop, and when I'm mincing, I'm not looking for everything to be exactly identical in shape. I'm just looking for everything to be really fine. How I mince food really depends on the appearance and flavor and aroma that I want the food to have when I'm done. Sometimes I really wanna bruise and smash and damage the food. Other times I wanna be really gentle and delicate. One example of a time where delicacy is really required is when you're working with herbs. What I often see when people are mincing herbs is a lot of this, pushing straight down, and then people will kind of run the knife back and forth, back and forth, and what I think is happening is they're looking for the food to be all the same size, and so if you see something a little bit bigger, you just keep going across. And this can be okay. By the end, you end up with something that's really dark in color, it's wet and a little bit sticky, it doesn't sprinkle well, and it doesn't hold well. As this sits, all those damaged cells continue to break down, and you get a dark, clumpy mass of herbs. Not great. So what you really wanna do when you're mincing herbs is to be a lot more methodical and delicate. What I like to do is run my knife across the herbs in one direction, and then I'll actually pick up the bundle of sliced herbs, rotate it 90 degrees, and then come back across the other way so that I'm only cutting the herbs twice. You wanna see as much horizontal motion and as little vertical motion as possible. It's a lot more delicate and gentle, and you'll see a lot less bruising. Herbs cut this way will just last a lot longer. It's pretty different, right? Like, you can see that color difference. There are times where that sort of bruising is fine. Like, if this basil were going into a soup, I wouldn't stress it so much, but if I were sprinkling this on a salad, that would not be ideal. These herbs, by contrast, they still have that beautiful color that the basil did before I started cutting it. They're gonna hold onto that color and hold onto their flavor, which is the really important thing. One instance where I really wanna do a lot of damage is with garlic. In most cases, I like my garlic to be pretty intense, and in order to get that intensity, I need to bruise and break as many of those cells as possible. What happens when I do that is compounds stuck within those cells, they get out, they mix, and one of the things that forms is allicin. Allicin is the compound that makes garlic super garlicky. So really, all I'm doing is placing the side of my knife on the garlic, smashing, and then running my knife back and forth across the garlic with as much of an up and down motion as possible, kind of like this. What I will also often do is switch my grip. I'll move my fingers to the tip of the knife and use both hands to push down. What this does is it means that my right arm is doing just a little bit less work. Great, now let's take a look at a dish where knife skills really matter. What I have in front of me is japchae. This is a Korean sweet potato noodle dish with a bunch of vegetables and some beef. I have a photo of the first day of recipe development where I was making five different versions of japchae, and as you can see, it was a ton of knife work. It was a great opportunity for me to practice and maintain my skills, and if you're looking to develop or maintain yours, I think this is a great dish to make. This dish was actually created for a king. It was served to him by an official, and you would best believe he really cared about how his vegetables were cut when he was presenting this dish. The really nice thing, though, is it was so good that he ended up getting a promotion because the king was just wowed, and I totally get it. Of the recipes I've developed recently, this is hands down my favorite. I just, I have to dig in. Is it rude to not make eye contact with you people while I eat? This is so good. For all that this is a noodle dish, it's really the vegetables that shine. There's a lot of knife work to get through, and so having great knife skills means it doesn't take you too much time. You don't waste a ton of food, and the payoff is fantastic. You get these vegetables that are just cooked through. They're still crisp the way raw vegetables are, but that tiny bit of heat blooms their flavors. They just taste better for it. Great knife skills will make you a more efficient cook, a less wasteful cook, and it makes being in the kitchen just a lot more fun. So, what's your go-to knife in the kitchen? Do you dice onions the same way I do? Let me know in the comments below. Be sure to like and subscribe, and check out CooksIllustrated.com for more great recipes and techniques.