Basic Knife Skills

hi I'm chef Tom I'm a professional chef I've trained all over the world I've learned all kinds of color secrets nan the TTP welcome back so in this episode we do nothing but basic knife skills so couple things you have to talk about first we start this is actually how to hold your knife and I see a lot of people holding fingers here up here like this all kinds of ways but it's really way you want to hold your knife is you don't have your your middle finger right here so your knife kind of balance on it your thumb and your pointer finger should be held right here so like if there was a hole between the knife it would they be touching and these last two fingers kind of help balance a knife out so this will be your emotion hold the knife so I see a lot of people doing wrong with this is they kind of grip the knife like this so the knife the hand starts shaking is really tight but in all actuality I kind of be able to pull the knife out your hand only start cutting so this carrot here does he teach you a lot about how to hold a knife and basic knife skills so I'm gonna do is just cut a little bit of this top off cut some little pieces make easier to work with cut this in half and now we're going to begin now we got to do here is you see a lot of people doing this fancy things and sometimes you do that but with a carrot I'll show you that the really proper way how to slice the carrot now hand position is extremely important so you want to put your hands down like this and you only have to make sure your pinky and your thumb are behind the knife obviously you get them in front of it like that you were to get your feelings hurt and that be kind of a bad day so getting started these two fingers going to kind of cloth hold onto the carrot these two fingers are gonna be your guide so what you want to do is put your knife right it begins to your fingers again your fingers are cocked back so don't get cuff you have a lot like this you cut yourself so hold them back a little bit and again you're going to have your knife frit against there you want to slice it down and again slice it slice it and slice it now when you're doing these slices one of the exercise like to have people do is try to get them as thin as possible so cut it thin and when you're practicing this don't try to go fast get the technique down speed will come with time so again thin thin thin what I see a lot of people doing is what I call a paper cutter and I'll put the knife down stationary and they'll cut cut cut and that does the job but not that great so make sure you have a nice smooth rocking motion on there another thing I see people do that's kind of wrong is actually take a knife down and just try to push it through and again it'll work but you know when you have to do one care or one onion or piece of celery you kind of hold the knife in all you wan or do any technique and you'll probably get through it but if you have to do like a thousand of these or 50 pounds of here at a time you have a bad day so again slice slice rocking motion on the knife so once we're at the end of the carrot the next part of exercise is to take these guys here and actually begin again now when you're doing this rocking motion again be smart with it I work smart not hard again we're doing one cure today so this may not make a lot of sense free but if you have a lot of carrots this will definitely get you so since this is so small I want to start using the back of the blade see so I I don't have to lift the blade up too much to get this cut going but I still get the job done I sleep in my rocking motion everything's there you want to see a lot of people doing well try to rock up here and try to come down and you know your hands come up much higher and again today if you do one care or two carrots not a problem proper technique be back here and much less work same product being done again when you do anything there's toys you learn it the easy way the hard way the easy way is going to be I'm going to show you I'll do this technique y'all got chef you know it's a great technique I got it or you know you could try doing yourself and your technique might be little bit off what's going to happen is if you hold the knife wrong your hands to start cramping up and start getting blisters or again you could probably cut yourself but you know everyone can't learn the technique the easy way so sometimes you will cut yourself this will not be is technique to learn but you'll get it a lot of practice before you starting knife skills you want to do is make sure knife sharp what I usually do is take my thumb and run over the blade and one feeling for is the edge is edge really sharp is it top of my fingers is it smoother my fingers if it's smoother my finger it's gonna be a really dull knife don't drag it down and I'll cut you but just just run it across there and see how it feels so my nape is nice and sharp I share myself but I recommend that you take your knife to a professional person probably at least once a year and make sure it's maintains a manufacturer's edge before you start any knife skill exercise what you want to do is steal a blade and what stealing does is it hones a blade doesn't really sharpen it but it just puts out a nice nice edge on it so doing this you want to stay on that 18 to 20 degree angle and you're looking well you're looking for the noise kind of sounds funny but it's true here hear the noise that how the knife kind of stings to you that's a proper enough I go a little higher angle here out here it's a dull thud that's what you want nice seeing blade you know you can do two several ways they see some people go like this this kind of makes you nervous because it's going down towards my hands and you definitely wanna make sure the guards are covering your finger so I see people don't like this that doesn't matter as long as it's all done on 18-200 go I also recommend that you never let anyone else steal your blade because I have a different edge on it and that could kind of dull it really really quick so let's continue all the onion now I always get the stories with people off chef Donna makes her cry what can I do and there's nothing you can do and reason why unjust make a cry is an on the acid in the onion now if you have a Maui onion or Vidalia onion there's very low acid if any acid nak have a prom what this Rick is Spanish onion I could have a lot of acid now what makes it have a lot of acid is longer it's it's stronger get so if you're in the winter time and you're getting a lot of onions or maybe even early spring these onions have been sitting there for probably months at least and kind of dehydrated and acid them is extremely strong and you will cry can't do anything about it no the goggle thing doesn't work or plugging notice and act work you're just going to cry so let's get start with onion starting with the onion you want to take the top off now we take the top of you someone take a little bit of this off you don't want to take a time but obviously a lot of people have a lot of scrap you don't want throw stuff away next part you do is a root end and again with the ruin you just want to take a small amount as possible and I do the root and second for a very important reason is because it's a root right here uncut that guy in half and reason why I cut that in half is when I do my further knife skills ruin kind of holds the onion together so I'll come in here cut that right down see cut that right in half now they have in half I'll just peel the first layer of skin off and you don't have any the brown on there now cutting the onion can be a little bit tricky but I'm sure you do this we try start cutting onion it's a pretty easy process but couple things you have to watch out for you want to put your palm on top of onion you know I start putting slices through it now I should laughs people your hands just down there to hold the onion place is not on their thumb don't don't push your hand down there because try to put your knife through at the same time that could be a bad thing any reason I get my fingers out for some if I had like this of course you cut them where for some reason even like this you go all the way through it'd be a bad day I guess if you're nice really sharp go through really quick where it's really dull you start putting a lot of pressure on shoots right through the side so hand down fingers out and you want to make nice slices Eve on the cutting board slice slice slice you know if you want to do small days large Jase however days you want to do it just make the slices that bigger but you see they're very even when you cut through this you wanna go with like 3/4 way through it and towards the root end again start the the top in golden do not cut for the root on this otherwise will fall apart okay so now we have our horizontal slice now I do the vertical slices so again root ends away from you and you want to come in again I'm not going through the onion I know it might look like I'm doing it the way I'm doing this technique but it's not okay so now Gamla cuts in there looks pretty good and I'm going to cut the onion up now doing this again you could use the same claw method your pinky and your thumb I'm going to come be on the bottom of you're holding together so when you start slicing it sometimes especially a nice not that sharp let's start blooming out and kind of makes an even so these fingers here again your fingers are here and keep the knife ready begins these guys now when you get down here you notice that it's very difficult to to operate and if you start going this it has a tendency to wiggle what you want to do is just flip it over now you have a whole nother set up so you might have to add your lines a little bit into here but for the most part you should be all set counting up right here here here maybe one more this this part here is garbage don't don't mess around that another good tip about using knife I see a lot of people they want to take your blade across the cutting board and that those are really quickly if you could do that use the back your blade or use a bench scraper that works great and this scaling will teach how to drilling a potato if you're doing julienne bet net or if we do small dice large dice me and dice it's all pretty much the same process being so let's get started the first thing I want to do so I want to take a little slice out of potato so I can have a flat edge to work with push out off the side I'm going to box a little bit our top and the bottom now see these scraps for mashed potatoes or wherever else you might want to use these for so I'm not going to box all the way around I see people try to make this into one whole square and what happens if you either take that off you take that off end up with a really small part of potato and let's still like this a little bit so the first thing I want to do is I'm going to make my initial slice and now I'm going to start planking now planks are either eighth inch quarter inch 1/2 inch or 3/4 inch depending how you want to end up with it if it could be eight of an inch it's going to be Julian I know quarter inch bat net so forth and so on so now planking this is a little bit tricky what you need to do can have your hand sitting here put the knife right up against your hands and what I want to do is look right down over blade and I want to mark it and I want to slice it down make sure you cut straight down I see a lot of people have cut down and they'll be on an angle so you don't have that nice straight edge so I do cut more here for you again what you want to do is mark this and just slice it down mark it and slice it down okay now that you have your planks what you want to do is cut these into julienne or bat net you know again Julian's 8 inch by 8 inch by 2 inch or a bettin it is quarter quarter by two so getting this down now you want to do the same technique if you wanna make this look like a square these ends have to be square so I'm put the knife down overlook it slice it down again put the ends on it slice it down so when you're done with this you have a square on this side the square on this side and that's I make potato bat nets practice makes perfect and these skills so take your time potatoes are really easy way to start with your bat nets or Julian's I've used carrots I they tend to bend are kind of tricky so get the potatoes down first then go ahead and do other things like carrots working with the garlic it's pretty easy when you get the whole cloves what you want to do is put your palm it like this and just push down a little bit and that kind of cracks whole thing up and once you have these guys out kind of separate the cloves a little bit so now there's couple applications ones you have this size you know you might want to slice the garlic you might want to chop the garlic you might want to mince the garlic each time you do the garlic a little bit different so have a little different taste to it and if you want to roast the garlic that's a totally different taste but I'm gonna show you some quick techniques how to work with this garlic now the next thing you want to do is you want to get the skin off this guy so you put your knife on top here give it a little crack and this will help you take the skin off very easy don't smash it down so hard where the whole thing breaks apart now if your application is going to be say kind of like a fine dice this is what you want to do it very similar to the onion put your fingers on top of here get on top start slicing these down that right there's your chopped garlic now we do a sliced garlic you know it's the same kind of start procedure but slice garlic you probably use something when you're doing saute work the small chopped garlic is great if you're trying to saute work I find that they tend to burn really quickly so I tend to slice it okay so I'm gonna peel this garlic up with different this time because I don't want to smash it up so I'm just go ahead and take it on the root end here and I'm going to start peeling the skin off that tends to work really well sometimes in this garlic you'll see a little green piece in the middle that's the germ some people remove that some people don't remove that a lot of people tend to think that all that's gonna be better naturelle it's really sweet because the plants are going to grow again so there's a lot of sugar in there anyways let's get the slice in this same technique as we've done before put the knife on there mark it down this is the root end you want to kind of get rid of all that's good to use if you don't want the green part in there let me show you how to do that you want to do is I put the garlic down cut the bun cut the end off first and what you want to do is slice it in half and there's a green part right there so what you want to just take your paring knife and you want to V this and you want to pull that guy out so now that's all out in go ahead and slice it like normal if you want to make garlic paste add the chopped garlic all I want to do is keep chopping this up leaving out the garlic's really sticking you begin to hold on to your blade let's have it a little bit I take some salt put some salt on this and I want to start doing this just kind of start mashing it with my knife and what salt does this all kind of helps hold in place so when I go to mash it it stays right there and now you have a garlic paste this would be good for finishing some tomato sauce is there any place to run a nice raw garlic flavor in it you

Channel: Thomas Johnson

Views: 296,606

Rating: 4.8695903 out of 5

Keywords: chef tomm, culinary secrets, knife skills, how to use your knife, knife, cut

Id: 12issg3EdA8

Length: 19min 7sec (1147 seconds)

Published: Sun May 06 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/jecahn]

I like that this guy is oriented towards precision instead of speed. That's a good lesson. I think that beginners think that "knife skills" are how you make a lot of noise and have stuff flying around your board.

[u/xcvbsdfgwert]

In half of the time you can learn knife sharpening. Mino Tsuchida makes me chuckle.

[u/CleverLittleLady]

Chef Tomm breaks it down to the tiniest details on how to hold your knife, how to cut, where to cut, by using carrots, potatoes, onions and garlic. He emphasizes the importance of knowing these fundamentals and goes at a pace where anyone and everyone can follow. Very helpful!

[u/The_Unreal]

Well now I feel like a moron for how I was dicing garlic. Embarrassing.

[u/jeohn]

The way he teaches to cut onions will change lives.

[u/PhishGreenLantern]

"Uh.... You're gonna have a bad day"

[u/kennyminot]

What I learned from that video is that my knife sucks

[u/erikpotter82]

Relevant.

[u/sephadex]

The thing I always have trouble with is holding whatever I'm cutting properly and sliding my fingers back smoothly to keep the slices even. Any tips?