Basic Knife Skills with Andrew Zimmern

so if you if you like to cook if if you say oh cooking is my hobby or you know i really love to cook for my family um and you wouldn't be watching my instagram live if you didn't describe yourself somewhat in a category that loves to do that kind of thing um then you should be practicing knife skills now what does practicing knife skills mean it means you put a big ziploc bag in your freezer and every day cut an onion a carrot celery potato and when you're done practicing you have this big pile of cut vegetables some good some not you can use them that night for cooking or you can just shove them in a bag in the freezer and when that bag gets big and overstuffed you can make vegetable soup it's that simple but the more you practice the faster you will find yourself whipping through recipes because there are only about nine different cuts that you really need to master and i would argue that if you only mastered four or five of them you'd be able to cook any dish in the whole world and do it quickly and efficiently um later on in the winter time as we get to some of the other recipes we're doing i'm going to show you how to use different should knives to butcher a chicken i'm going to show you how to fillet a fish right which are the two things i would encourage you to do because if you fillet a fish then you have the frame to make stock it's also a really good skill set to have and you know whole chickens or whatever seven dollars a pound and pieces of chicken are like 15 a pound in some grocery stores so you save a lot of money plus you get the bones to make stock and you really get to do some fun cooking in the wintertime so i would argue that one of the key things that you really need to know how to do is is cut things use your knives so i just this is a i'll just call it a hybridized style of knife uh this is you know a shoon it's one of my favorite knives it's a dual core knife in that it has stainless on the outside and it has a carbon steel on the inside to retain its edge it has a damascus finish that little printing on there it's called a damascus finish and it has a handle and shape that is both european and japanese at the same time i think this is a super attractive line that they have and i could have picked any knife they have a japanese style uh knife here blunt nose vegetable knife um this is their santoku from another line what else do we have here you know a very typical fred the blade at least french style serrated knife um we can get into all that stuff as the rest of our uh cooking time together over the holidays unfolds but while this is sweating i wanted to show you how to make some basic cuts and how to practice them uh at home so that you guys find cooking to be less of a chore and more of an enjoyable experience right okay so first thing that i want to uh show you is let's go through um some uh well they have french names because the french codified it uh batons and alamets which are literally sticks and matchsticks um and different sizes of uh of dice and we can do that all uh with this carrot um i washed it i don't peel it because you know if i'm practicing i don't need to go through that extra step i also don't mind the peel being on the carrot if i'm using organic carrot that is um been washed and dried and all i'm going to do i'm just going to trim the ends off that would go into my bag for myself and i'm going to make a cut right here i'm going to place the tip of my knife down turn sideways you can see it and i'm just going to push the knife through to make a nice clean cut and now i have this two inch long piece of carrot okay first thing that i want to do is i want to cut this into basically quarter inch slices so quarter inch and you notice i'm pushing the knife down letting the knife do the work and allowing the blade of the knife which i keep sharp all the time we'll get to how i do that in a minute or two and i just push it down i stroke through [Music] the carrot what that allows me to do is i push it through is to keep it at a quarter inch all the way if i wiggle or do some other sort of knife move i'm not going to get a uniform all the way through quarter inch knife a quarter inch slice i can keep my wrist straight if i go at an angle it's going to bow out if i go at this angle it's going to get narrower but if i just push down from the front and keep my eyes locked on it i'm just going to get a nice quarter inch piece okay so now i have these two bars that are a quarter inch uh thick and two inches long and however wide that carrot is and all i'm going to do is i'm going to cut this off we'll do something else with that i'm just trimming up this curvy sides because i want to be really precise this is when i if you're coming to my house tonight and i'm going to make caco van i want really beautiful carrot dice into my dish and i'm just going to make quarter inch cuts here doing the same thing tip of the knife down and driving my knife through so now i have what are commonly referred to as batons they are a quarter inch by a quarter inch by a quarter inch by two inches long that is a classic baton right so now how do i get perfect quarter inch dice take two or three of these whatever is comfortable for you and this time you can do the push method or you could lay the tip of your knife down and rock it either way at this point and just cut and i'm just sliding it through the same motion and now i have perfect quarter inch dice the knife never leaves my cutting board the tip of the knife never left my cutting board why is that important because as you're learning to do this your knife is going all over the place you have more of a chance to cut yourself now i'm going to take a piece of carrot and i'm going to show you what you shouldn't do there are two places most people cut themselves one if they're poking at their food with the tip of their knife if you're cutting improperly here you're going to nick the front of your forefinger or another finger if you have lazy thumb and your thumb slides through you're going to cut the edge of your thumb those are the two places you're going to cut yourself the most most people don't accidentally take a chef's knife when they're cutting carrots and put it through their hand by the way vegetables are fully sweated in goes my wine in goes my clam juice your muscle broth your fish stock combinations of all of them and we're just going to let that come to a boil before we put our seafood in so i want to wonder what you're cooking oh yeah we're doing a we're doing a fish and muscle chowder which you can make with just clams just fish with shrimp and mussels you can interchange anything with it is the most simple and easy sort of fish soup that i know that everybody loves if you slide your thumb out when you're coming down if you have lazy thumb you're gonna cut your thumb if you poke at it with the tip of the knife you're gonna nip the edge of your finger which is why if i use this finger my four finger knuckle as a guide and i keep my thumb back and you use your fingers in a claw shape to hold the vegetable i can literally look you right in the eye and just keep cutting that in a thin slice i don't even need to look down on the board because i can feel with my fingers where this is and i can slice paper-thin little moons all day long all right neaten that up so what comes after we did batons and we did classic dice what's the next one the next one is going to be matchsticks a lot of times people want to make matchstick size vegetables all you do is you do the exact same thing except you just slice them thinner at about what is that a sixteenth of an inch and i do the exact same thing start my knife it's high so i can't start it on the tip because i'm just gonna be i'm gonna have my arm in an awkward position but i just hold it stable with a flat end on my cutting board place my knife and i'm like yep that's exactly the width of the slice i want and just push it down and through straight all the way through the carrot right when i get to this point stack two or three of these pieces and cut the same way except this time i can put the tip of my knife down onto the ground and use that push slice technique that i was talking about and i wind up with a pile of perfect matchsticks see how that is so there's the matchstick there are those batons that we're talking about that brought us to this quarter-inch dice and i'll use this little piece here if i cut matchsticks and line them up and do the same thing i did with the batons take those perfect matchsticks and i cut them in the same width that sixteenth of an inch i can make perfect brunoise or fine dice which is very nice for some soups and stews or other things that you may need to cut for so you have sort of those four general shapes right right there if you can do those four things you are going to be way way way ahead of the game there's almost nothing that you won't be able to cook i'm just turning up the heat on what's going to be our chowder um celery is really confusing for people um because it's curved and what i do with celery typically if it when you're on the inside of that head of celery the curves are tighter the outside they're broader right so this one is from the inside i'll typically slice this in half and then make my long bar cuts and if need be if i want dice i just line them up and just like the carrot except celery is so much softer i can do that dice now if you do this and you're working in a super fancy restaurant a chef will come along and say no good start over why because it's not a dice right it has a rounded end to it as opposed to my carrot which would pass muster this this this dice right here would win me any of those top chef quickfire knife skills challenges this one tom and podma and gail would send me to the back of the line right so if you're making something casual like a tuna fish salad or something where you know just for sandwiches or for the family i don't think anyone wants to make it perfect but if you're doing something for a dinner party you may want to in which case you're going to want to trim the curved ends off the same way that i did before with my carrots just square up your slices and there's some carrot batons let's make those look super nice um some other things people do that i want to make sure to show you while we're on the topic of general knife skills uh last two things i want to show you and then we'll get to the shellfish part and we'll serve our soup and get some more of your questions um potatoes a lot of people cut themselves slicing potatoes and the reason is it's rocky and it's all over the place and it moves and your board moves by the way my board is secured with a damp towel um so how do you then start cutting a potato it's just a potato it's it's not 1978 we're not at studio 54 it's not beautiful you know pink cocaine it's not a fortune it's a potato just cut a slice off so it's stable and flat right and then you can do slices right you can do your batons and you can do the exact same thing if you want to dice potatoes right you just cut take away the curvy ends stack them up right and dice your potato super super simple what happens if you want to slice your potato and you want the whole circle on there oftentimes what i will do is i'll use a mandolin a slicer so that all if i'm making a pretty greta or something i i want to you let the the instrument do the work for me and so all of those you know ben renner's and other tabletop slicers are really really great for that if you do not have one make sure that you roll the potato around to find the safest edge and really pay attention and go slowly until you're comfortable doing it a different way the biggest issue and where most people have uh not the most trouble but certainly the greatest opportunity uh to uh work with their onions right so you have here a uh the top of the onion the bottom of the onion all of the onion petals those leaves are attached to this bottom so when i peel my onion i take the top off i take the bottom off just as much as i need it's still attached down there and then i take the paper off now depending on how onions were aged like garlic they have to be dried when they come out of the ground this one is this year's onion signs at the end of the season you're getting onions from other places and you can tell if they peel easily they're new onions right so this is from this season beautiful onion and i'm going to cut it in half again tip of the knife down on the board and drive through it you can see here those petals of the onion are all being held together right by that end of the onion the root end right where the onion root goes down into the ground that other top is where the onion flour comes out of now what a lot of people will do is they will make slices this way and then slices this way and make their dice i'm going to show you how to do that and then i'm going to show you a way that i do it that i think is a little bit little bit safer okay and the reason is it's not the up and down strokes where people get cut it's going sideways and i see actual professionals on instagram trying to work their knife in and then yank it out and i'm like oh that person doesn't know how to cut an onion or they haven't done it a lot um so i'm gonna sort of stand awkwardly and do this with you and stick my clams in so those have a chance to cook uh first thing that i want to do and again don't stand this way squared up to your board but i'm doing this so you can see what i'm doing start at the heel of the internet you remember before we're starting at the tip of your knife and working down here we're going to start at the heel and pull it forward and i want to make sure that my knife doesn't skip there's no burrs on it i want the knife super sharp the reason why i want the knife super sharp is so that it actually moves through the onion with my hand right so i've honed my knife i've not sharpened it by putting a new edge on it i've just honed it right it's a big difference i put new edges on my knives every couple of months i hone them every half hour of sort of chopping time on my cutting board so all i want to do all i want to do is start with the heel of my knife and draw it through let the knife blade do the work for me it's kind of odd to do it in this position but just draw it through and i don't cut all the way i leave them attached there and with an onion that's an inch tall maybe you make three or four incisions right every quarter inch i just don't go all the way through then tip of the knife and don't worry those little pieces that are coming out are not because i'm making a mistake or you're making a mistake it's just that an onion sometimes has odd shaped pieces it's not perfect it's not like a daisy or a marigold where every leaf is the same but then when i turn it and slice it this way what happens really really nice diced onion comes out of there and you go all the way down then you could deal with the end and use that end for stock or whatever that you want to i mean you can keep going down and i got pretty deep penetration in there so this thing is going to dice almost all the way to the heel of the onion let me show you a way that i find is a little safer to teach beginners and if you have young cooks in your family and you're worried about kids with first time knife skills this is a super easy way to show them how all you do is actually use the front of the knife that technique before and just slice it in quarter inch strips all the way down to the heel i've got that last little bit i'll use for something else so i have all these quarter inch slices and then all i do is come in quarter inch intervals this way when i get to this point rather than try to fight this unstable object i put it down just turn it on its side and keep going and it won't flip around or go anywhere i can even do that last one and what i have here is i have one piece of onion that sort of fell away so if i want to use that i can just make a couple of cuts it just is a simpler easier way i think to teach a beginner to drama this is slightly more advanced because there's more room for error with that lateral slice so there's your you know sort of primer 101 about how to oh going to need parsley by the way this is you should look in here my my clams are starting to open i turned one on the let me fish it out there for you um i let my clams come to room temperature before i put them in so it's not like putting ice cubes into broth um but you can see here it's actually starting to open and we just put it in there a couple seconds ago i just move those around because there's hot spots even in simmering liquid and i just want to make sure my clams all have an equal opportunity to open once they start to open like that i add my fish and i just let it sit on top because i know my clams need another three or four minutes those cubes of fish will just poach gently in the top of that beautiful broth there parsley everybody always wants to know about parsley um i don't like the big stems at the bottom but those little stems that the leaves are attached to i really like them they have a lot of flavor right so all that i do is i take this bunch and i fold it in half right so that my first cut super fine and a lot of times this is all i will do to parsley and the reason is parsley has a really lovely bitter flavor to it i adore and i will put sometimes a handful of parsley cut this way into a salad or any kind of dish because i just i want a lot of parsley but i want you to bite down on parsley and taste it if i want to uh mince my parsley i'm gonna sprinkle it on something by the way you see there that cut of parsley is what i did right here because you can see it went across some of the leaves but if i want to mince my parsley i just rock my knife back and forth a couple times now this parsley you'll notice is not turning darker it's not turning color it's not getting dark green it doesn't look wet and the reason is is because we washed it and really dried it well you can over chop parsley and all of those liquids in the parsley come out and the parsley itself starts to oxidize yes parsley oxidizes so many things do when they're exposed to air but if you just pass your knife a couple times over and you notice i always keep one end down in all my fingers i mean this is out of habit i keep my one hand firmly against it and my fingers out of the way that's just habit because i've practiced now can anyone out there tell me what i'm doing that seems unusual to you when i'm mincing like that or doing fast motions i did it with the carrot slicing when i went really fast and looked into the camera i won't make you guess i choked up on the knife so if i hold the knife down here not only do i not get enough pressure to cut something six eight inches away but i don't have control this can move all over the place and someone can push it uh vicky try to push the knife left or right just push it left or right yeah it's pretty easy to i don't have much control over it but if i choke up on it now try to push it yeah you can't when i was in little league they said if you want to you know get control of the head of the bat the end of it choke up on the handle it's the same thing with knife work choke up on the handle the longer the blade the more i tend to choke up because then i get more control over where the blade is and it fits more comfortably in my hand

Channel: Andrew Zimmern

Views: 14,262

Rating: 4.9625468 out of 5

Keywords: andrew, zimmern, Cooking, Culinary, Literacy, Kitchen, instructions, How, to, Yum, delicious, favorite, eating, meal, Travel, Channel, family, azcooks

Id: 30B29xZI9BI

Length: 25min 16sec (1516 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2020