How to Cut Like a Chef with a Japanese Knife

hey guys welcome to our cut like a chef class today we're gonna talk about how to use our knives properly and safely so here a knife where we specialize in Japanese kitchen knives but you might have already been able to deduce these guys are made out of some pretty incredible steel really really hard to stuff that holds in it extremely well but when that also comes a little bit of responsibility they're a little bit more fragile they can get chipped a bit more easily and they're really sharp so if you're not using a writing cut yourself pretty bad with something like this guy the first thing we want to talk about is just some shape just some basic overall stuff here we got a few different ones on the board here this is sort of like your your chef's knife it's called a Yuto this one is made by Terry Gaston Fujiwara 240 millimeters in length is sort of a big boy and this is what I would recommend for like everyday you know when you got there everything knife you're sort of go to if you want one knife in the kitchen this is a great way to go it's got a bit of a tip on here it's not a bit of a belly it's really good at sort of doing articulate tasks there's a few other varieties though this is called a boom cup or a santoku this is sort of like a smaller and scale and pull them up together here you can see they're a little bit of a different size this guy's a little bit more manageable for some people it's got a bit of a flatter edge along it too so when you're chopping against the cutting board with this gay make a lot of contact and the other one I'm gonna be using today is called a nakiri when the kirie is a sort of a rectangular shape to bench the whole knife this guy makes a great deal of contact with the cutting board great for chopping great for chopping like boneless meats and that sort of thing you don't see these made by every every manufacturer especially in the Western world but I think it's got a great deal value to it these guys are phenomenal so we're gonna use these three knives today let's talk about how you hold your knife one of the first things that you do when you get your knight is you pick it up and you wave it around you feel where the balance point is so your balance point is extremely important when you're talking about your kitchen right now every knife is balanced it's just a matter of where it's balanced you see sort of two different basic styles here you got western style with that sort of bolstered handle on here it's got these rivets and a little bit more weight back here on this guy you got your wah style handle which is a little bit more light if you have a bit of a or we're facing balance let's find our balance point on these guys so with my Western knife I'm gonna pick it up I'm gonna start a little with two fingers and I'm gonna find where it doesn't sort of Teeter forward and I'm gonna find where it doesn't sort of totter backwards it's usually just past the bolster in this sort of area of your knife right here fujiwara son has actually go ahead and put this little divot in there so you can hold it really nice and close up to the tip of the blade here so you'll notice I'm sort of holding the blade by the blade it's not so much by the handle you know it'll pick up their knife and they hold it by the handle cuz it's called the handle as we handle things from but that's not actually gonna put us in very good control think about it this way if you're writing an essay or a paper or something like that or to check and you got your PIN you don't hold it way up here and write with it like that you sort of get really close right got your hand on the table and you're using it really close to where the actions taking place it's the exact same principle with knives so I like to grip up a bit on this knife and put my hand in a place where I feel like I'm in really good control kind of balance for me it's gonna feel lighter overall sort of drip up on that guy the balance point is usually a little bit further forward on something like this so you want to grip up a little bit more both knives are great it's all a matter of personal preference it's just it's just finding what feels right to you so a little bit further forward on this guy a little bit further back on this guy that is your basic some knife balancing and that sort of thing so let's talk about let's talk about how you're actually gonna use this knife my dominant hand holds tonight my non-dominant hand gonna hold my food so I got my carrot here I'm gonna cut this guy up I'm sort of putting my hand on this carrot to steady about my C logical doing is holding the carrot really far back so I don't cut themselves which is all fine and good safety first right but it doesn't put me in a great deal of control over where my knife is actually gonna end up what I want to do is sort of grip really close to where I'm cutting and I use the third knuckle on my middle finger and that acts as a guide for where that knife is gonna end up this is sort of your caliper knuckle right here right that's gonna sort of end up guiding my knife through the rest of my fingers here I sort of use as like a a pinch a claw I sort of drip the food behind that middle finger and I rest my heel down either on booter on the board so I'm nice implanted it's all nice and stable here I'll use my middle finger sort of guide where that knife is going to go I just slide it through this is super simple it takes a little bit of practice to get the sort of feel of this sort of thing but stick with it cuz it's really safe and it's easier to do it's gonna save you a whole lot of headache in the kitchen later all right so we're gonna use that claw we're gonna grip up on our knife we're gonna bring both units pretty close together there we go this way we're gonna end up with nice chopped vegetables and I'm gonna cut ourselves the board that we're working a lot by the way is super important your cutting board makes an enormous difference on how your your knife is gonna hold its edge what you're looking for is something that's kind of soft and supple this is a large wood board so when I take my knife and I cut into the board I can actually feel the edge of the Knights started getting right in there that's a good thing right that means that it's not gonna dull up my knife if you use it like a glass cutting board or a bamboo board it's gonna slide around on there so they'll just ruin the edge of your knife super super fast so when I cut in to this guy the edge of my knife sinks into the board a bit this board is also great as long as you keep these guys a little bit waxed it's not gonna absorb any liquid or fluid or nasty stuff that can get into plastic boards quite easily and it's really easy to clean when you're done so there's your basics grip up on your knife find your balance point rip up on that guy and use your your non-dominant hand safely use that claw method it's gonna make a huge huge difference I mean not band-aids you go through it all right that's super important so before we really get into it let's talk about some major do's and don'ts it's mostly don'ts so when we're working with our knife there's a few habits that a lot of people have namely the biggest one is scraping food around on your cutting board using the edge of your knife that's sort of noise that's the to avoid and I can hear it from across the room and I'll come get you if I hear you doing it we scrape food around with the edge of your knife that's gonna cause the edge of your knife to get dull it's gonna it's gonna ruin the engineering that the whole nor sharpen your knife much more frequently if you're doing that so avoid using your knife as a tool to move food around in your cutting board put the knife down use your hands your hands are literally your hands you can use for just about everything you've ever done your whole life this tool as well as a food scoop you can pick stuff up of that guy and then move it to your pot yeah so avoid scraping another thing that I see a lot of people doing is this aggressive sort of rock chop motion I don't know if you ever took driver's ed but they always tell you don't turn the wheels of your car when you're Parkins you're gonna bawl out your tires it's the exact same principle with your knife when you're doing that kind of motion it's gonna dull up the tip of your knife really quick it's also really bad for your wrist and moving your wrist around a whole lot you're gonna get into trouble you get carpal tunnel or Nia tendonitis so take care of your body I like to lock my wrist and more with my elbow and my bicep and lift the knife with each slice right that's a big one but the nature of these cutting boards I find that the edge of the knife sorta drips inside of them a little bit so don't put your knife into the bore and then twist and torque around is that can cause dulling and chipping and that sort of thing so let's let's try to keep in mind how we're moving our bodies and how we're moving our knives and that'll help your well-being and your knife over the long term all right so the first major component that we're going to chop up is our mirepoix I don't know if you ever heard the term mirepoix before but mirepoix is sort of I make some Malone's a very sort of neutral flavor it's very good in neutral flavors so you're going to use carrot you're going to use sorry and you're going to use onion those are your three primary portions of your mirepoix other ingredients that you can throw in there bay leaf garlic think about anything that you would stuff into the cavity of a chicken before you roast it so broccoli probably not awesome it's gonna get overcooked it's gonna kind of tastes like iron peppers get a little bit bitter you also want to think about flavors that are going to overpower the rest of your material also like fennel and that kind of thing is really good to take over and it's all gonna taste like fennel so carrots celery onion that's your big three in mirepoix room let's start with the carrots here all right so dicing up the carrot the word dice just like you're shooting dice right I am use little cues a little little cubes are small dice and medium dice large laces brunoise there's a whole lot of variations on it the first step is always gonna be the same its peeler so I'm sure you've all peel the carrot before the way I like to do it it's happen it's on the hole by the blood but if in the middle of the cutting board there we go easy-peasy right extremely sharp little guy here the main reason I like to peel my carrots this way because they all end up in one sort of location on my cutting board it's really easy to clean up when you're done carrot feels by the way you might hang on to these guys you can go into your stock you can throw these into a bag put them in the freezer when you got enough vegetable scraps you can make stock out of them super easy to do now let's run for this guy so whoever designed the carrots did not really have dice in mind they roll around on you they're kind of long we got to work with this guy a little bit before we can get it to a state where it's easy to manipulate and get a very very sort of uniform and fine shape to it so I'm gonna grab this guy maybe's my to curate so the first thing that I want to do is get rid of everything I don't want to eat so the peel is gone what else do I not want you here I don't want this bit so I'm gonna use my cloth I'm gonna cut this guy right off throw you into the saw the very tip we're sort of dried out because this guy right easy peasy so now we're at a hundred percent yield on this guy the rest of this we're going to be able to eat so first things first I want to shore it up I want to get that size right right now it's longer than my knife so I'm gonna take this guy into let's say three pieces here notice how whenever I'm working with anything that I'm going to continue working with I sort of shove it into the top-left corner on my cutting board this will be my inbox right I work with as much space as I possibly can on my cutting board and then my top right corner will sort of be my outbox right I want to give myself as much space as possible so he started working yourself into a corner that's when you're gonna hurt yourself right so my first restaurant job I worked in a place called pack rat movie back in Edmonton if anybody from pack rat Louie alumni is watching to see what's up guys I work for a guy named I was a bit of a stickler for his his shapes and his his knife skills and that sort of stuff so on my first day on my stodg I was tasked with making brunoise vegetables and if you're not familiar with what brunoise means it's a three by three by three millimeter Cuba and no that could be rounded all had to be perfectly square we put it into consomme I did not really understand that dish okay what I would have to do is take off all of the sides I would take all of this off of here and I would end up with sort of a rectangular prism of carrot all of this that goes into the stock it's kind of wasteful I don't really like being wasteful this is an event that I do at home but then I would take it into little sheets oh man hope it's not watching this is b-plus at best I would take my little sheets and I would put them a little stack and I would cut them into my if anybody knows if this is a mother say this is a Julian uses a a Cal its Union maybe sit bones Ruby and carrots right here and I don't take my Julia notice I didn't scrape my knife into it but plant my knife then I sort of push everything into it or I put my knife down completely and I make a little bundle with my hands at this point use that claw that Clause extremely important here you want to put your fingertips down on this guy your pinky and your thumb ripping it from the side like you're pinching it all into the center like that and then I get my brunoise carrot I say Bologna me a boo carrot is a perfect size for your consume there there we go so if if you have people over for dinner and they're taking a look at your carrots and they're going all those pieces a little bit round and they need to leave your house that's ridiculous ah this is it's nice but I bet you're not going for a Michelin star at home right now so we're gonna do something a little bit different it's gonna clean up carrots do something a little bit different it's really clutch is that first cut you saw me make on my cylinder earth carrot here I took off one flap there we go I take that one flap off now it sits still this is really important it's still on your cutting board it's not gonna roll around like these pieces here so you're much better control of it this piece that I cut off I'm gonna keep going to put that off of the side there for now sits flat what I want to do now let's make this into a bunch of these and it's really easy to do now that it's sitting still I use my claw guide knuckle there we go you now we have our little sheets of carrot here I got to take these guys one if you're appealing ambitious you can take a stack at two but I'm gonna be one at a time I've already cut these into our Juliet beautiful it's super easy to do once it sits flat for you you'll notice that the control you tube here once it sits flat for you you're gonna be able to control it a lot better that claw is going to be a lot easier to maintain on there there we go we got a nice consistent julienne so if I were making a salad or a stir-fried or something that I'm going to eat with a fork or with chopsticks this is the perfect little size for an excellent little size but I want to be able to eat this with a spoon and this is hard so I'm going to cut them up a little bit further I'm gonna take a little bundle of them just do three or four when you're starting out three four or five something like that and make yourself a nice little bundle and tighten it up tighten it up use that claw and tighten that guy up so that you can be extremely gentle with your knife that's really important there we go well smooth back every time once you get on to something that's a little bit harder to hold on to let's use less fingers here we go beautiful little carrot dice I'm gonna do up the rest of these guys here beautiful little carrot dice super easy to do get practice of that fly know what seems awkward when you're first learning it don't try to go too fast take your time perfectionism isn't built overnight right there we go nice little carrot ice this is really easy to fit into a spoon so we got our nice sweet carrots all diced up nice to scoop onto our bitter celery I am the flavor wheel you got a salty and sweet and all this kind of flavor I would say that celery sort of embodies like umami and bitter a little bit so we got a bundle of celery I never buy it when it's all pulled a power like that because this is so much more expensive I also like all of the leaves in the center here these guys are really delicious this chair a mountain for - you're mixed green salad let's just pull off one stalk here so celery is really really really easy to dice it already since flat for us which is really important it sits flat on our cutting board so we just have to take it from here essentially so what do we do first I want to get rid of everything that I don't want to eat right I use my bunka for this guy I'm gonna take off the very top I'm gonna take off the very bottom notice how I only took like a couple of millimeters off each of these guys here that's all it's required those guys can go onto your stock it already sits flat for us when we have a sort of rib side down on here so all I need to do I'm gonna take this into maybe three pieces here perfect up in the top left corner on my ward so there's a few different ways that we can go from here personally I always do it the easy way I like to do things the easy way I like to do it really quick and I like to do it in the safest way possible I always like to have my my knife hit the cutting board I avoid cutting horizontally whenever I can because it's a lot easier to sort of see it being done and actually doing it yourself cutting horizontally can be tricky because your knife disappears under your hand it's easy to cut yourself it's easy to mess up your food so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this guy and get my julienne by cutting it in half I then take these halves they sort of sit flat for me and I cut them into like three pieces depending on the size of your celery that's perfect right there perfectly loose julienne three pieces there there we are so now we got our julienne so it's gonna do one more here cut it in half but it sit flat take it into two or three pieces depending on the side of your celery there we go nice julienne really really easy to do there's not much to this stuff I then take these julienne I bundle them up on my cutting board I put them right in the center here claw goes down over top of that pinky and thumb at the side your fingers on top just like that sort of squinch it all in there we go guys so notice how I sort of release my fingers and I pull back every time be nice and gentle with your off hand there that means you're gonna be nice and gentle with your knife and there you go super easy right so what's really important is we gotta sit flat for us right we get the simulation flattened or a cutting board it's always going to be easier to chop up at the end of the day and that goes for not just celery not mascara but everything that you're cutting up I got my food scoop here get a blaster bag there we go so re-done carrot celery onion onion is the most important ingredient in pretty much everything that you're doing onion is awesome there are so many flavors in this guy and in depending on how you cook it you're gonna get a lot out of it so if I were to take a huge bite out of this right now I'd probably feel deep regret with the decisions that led me to this moment to my life when it is raw it's really powerful right everybody knows that onion smell and it hurts your eyes it makes you cry but if I were to dice this guy up and throw it into a pan with some some butter and cook it really low what happens well it begins to sweat that's the first thing that happens all of the steam begins to come off once all of the moisture which is by the way the stuff that makes you cry once the moisture is gone then it can start to get really hot the sugar in a yellow onion there's so much sugar in there so once it starts to get to that point above 100 degrees Celsius where water boils that's when you start to get that sweet flavor the sugars start to cook they become a little bit more forward and you get a nice sweet onion flavor I'm using yellow onions because I'm cooking them for a long time they have the most sugar they benefit the most from cooking for a long time purple onions a little bit more mild they sort of turn a weird color when you cook them for too long they sort of turn blue white onions are great they get a lot more spice to them they're really good like salsa or something like that but if I'm cooking onions that I can do them for a while like I'm making a pot of soup or a pot chili always use yellow so first things first what do we not want to eat on here well that's easy we don't want to eat the top we don't want even bottom we don't want to eat the skin so let's get rid of it big claw slide on through that guy nice and easy same thing on the other side now it's just flat for us skin tops bottoms all goes into the stock all that stuff goes into your stock instead of peeling it at this point I'm gonna cut it in half first at that point it's really easy to get a thumbnail underneath that that layer of skin you can pull that guy right off into the stock right into the stock all right so that that's advertising right that's exactly what we want out here so what I'm gonna do with this guy I'm gonna take off an additional layer I'm gonna take a look at it this is actually awesome this happen I take off an additional layer this guy right here I'm actually it's gonna cut that stuff right off I don't really want to eat it so I'm not going to I mean this onion cost what like 17 cents so I'm just gonna work with what I got here I don't like wasting food when I don't eat you so before we started cutting this guy up we want to get dice we want to get little squares with this guy so before we actually start dicing up let's take a look at it before we cut it up as a bunch of circles you got your circumference you got your diameter you got a radius think about a radial line it's a hand on a clock it goes from 12 o'clock to 1 o'clock to 9 o'clock I want to call a bunch of radial lines into this guy so you probably seen people doing this sort of thing where they cut into it horizontally I don't feel great about cutting horizontally I always like to hit the cutting board so I want to cut into this guy like the hands of the clock starting at the outside and moving down towards the center I want to come radials into this guy so here's what I'm gonna do using my claw I cut one piece here it's still attached at the back end there see what I've created a little flap little flap there I'm gonna keep going until I'm at that 12 o'clock position now I'm cutting straight up and down there we go look at that and it's still a little touch to the back here so it's easy to manage right I'm gonna keep going all the way around once I start running on a room for this hand here and move it over to that side and continue so there we go I put a bunch of radial lines into this guy now it's not important that you bust out like your protractor or something and measure all these angles as long as you're getting towards the center it's not a huge deal once I start dicing there we go beautiful super easy right look at all that perfect nice little dice nice little dice I'm gonna keep going here there we go perfect way easier it's so much easier than doing that horizontal method there because I always have my knife making that sound always hitting the cutting boards and it always tells me when I'm done cutting what you might end up with at the very end though it's something like this your little onion bud the onion but could be the baby or existence if you look close around the top here I can still sort of see some of those radial lines under Sonoma pretend I'm chopping up a rainbow there we go mix it all together no one will even be able to tell perfect weight easier to do way way easier to do so I'm gonna pop this guy into my bag the rest of my mirepoix so carrot celery onion we have sweet we have bitter you get spicy works together to create a very lovely little Malone's of all sorts of flavors it's the basic components of pretty much every dish you'll make for the lawful neutral kind of flavor right there you know all done all right so let's hit up some stir-fried veggies one of my favorite parts of a stir-fry is always a broccoli and broccoli is a bit more complex than you might think it's got the floret portion and the stem portion I'm gonna use both so the florets taste a little bit more metallic it's almost got something like iron flavor in there whereas the stem is a little bit sweeter so we're gonna take advantage of both these parts the only bit that I don't want to eat are these little leaves so I pull these leaves off of the side here pretty easy to do so when you're cutting up broccoli the biggest pitfall you can make is cutting the broccoli because as soon as I sort of put the knife into this area all of these little things all these little little beads fall out of here so I actually want to avoid putting my knife into this I am using a little bit of a tip because what I like to do is hold this guy upside down and then using the tip of my knife sort of go around and take them off piece by piece all my little florets they're super easy to do you can do this with a mercurial I just find this a bit easier to do with them more articulate tool but the tip of this knife than it is with anything else once I get to the center there I take that off one there we go we got our stem we got our florets so your florets I want them to be bite-sized that's what important because when you're eating a stir-fry you're usually using chopsticks or a fork so I want to make these guys really easy to get in my mouth so to do that again I don't really want to cut all the way through I put the knife part way through that little guy there there's cherry well cherry cherry apart that's the way it wants to come apart so I'm just going to let it happen there we go SuperDuper easy tear that guy right on up so what you're aiming for here is pieces that you can fit into your milk really easily we don't want a big giant chunky blocky bits broccoli cooks pretty fast when I'm making a stir fry I usually like to have a few different components to it I like to have my aromatic vegetables I like to have my meat and I like to have my more colorful vegetables like these little guys here these cooks super fast so he's going right at the end so will this guy but this is really hard so the harder your food is the more dense it is usually the slower it cooks so without changing the heat how do I make this cook faster it's easy you got a slice it really thin I got no control over the volume of this thing but I do have a lot of control over the surface area and the more surface area it has the faster its gonna cook so what I like to do to give myself a bit of an easier time cut this guy right in half so it's it's still on my cutting board now I want to slice this guy up as thin as humanly possible so I'm gonna take off a little bit from where it's all dried out broccoli by the way not great in your stock so keep it out of there at this point I want to slice it super thin so that's where I use my claw to my great advantage here and I can really get this guy nice and thin I lean right over the cutting board and I look exactly where the knife is gonna go and I got some nice thin slices out of this day this is what I'm looking for here really nice thin slices that cook really quickly and give you a lot of nice sweet flavor in your dish there we go that's what we want there nice thin pieces those are gonna really pop they're gonna add a lot of sweetness to your flavor if I pop one of these in my mouth it's almost like sweet peas tasty delicious the big chunkier bits they're fine too you can toss them in if you're lazy just like that but you get much better results when you slice them up super thin I also like to put peppers in my stir-fry peppers are really easy to and there's you know I was in different ways to chop these guys up but the way that I prefer using I don't want the stem I don't want the majority of the pith and I don't want all those seeds and stuff in there so I put it sort of head side up on my cutting board and using sort of a swooping motion I cut it out just in little segments here there we go look at that once I take a couple of segments off it's really easy to see what I'm working with here that's the part that I don't want to eat that's part I don't want to eat so I'm gonna cut around that and what I end up with on my cutting board here are some nice usable pieces and then in my left hand I'm left with this guy which is what I don't want so that guy goes away easy peasy right so I've been talking about putting your food upside down and making it sit flat but that's not actually something I like to do with my peppers because this skin is is waxy and it sort of shines and it really my knife slides around on it quite a bit so what I like to do upside down and I cut into the membrane side here so I'm gonna take this guy I'm gonna slice it up its latest this guy into some nice little julienne now I'm not gonna dice this up because I'm making a stir-fry right we could certainly turn it on its side and get diced them up like that but I want them to be easy to pick up with my chopsticks or my fork I also don't want to cut them too thin if there's one thing that I don't like it's overcooked vegetables and if I apply too much heat to really really thin peppers they're gonna start to turn the motion really fast so I wanted to have a little bit of thickness - oh there you go julienne peppers next little broccoli florets we're well on our way to get in a really kick-ass stir-fry so ginger is an extremely important component in a lot of recipes not just in stir-fry this guy's got a range right it's one of the only ingredients I can think of it's got a great deal of crossover between a stir-fry and a batch of cookies you know but there's a couple of hurdles we got to jump over to get that nice sweet spicy flavor out of there it's always really irregular so I just want to break it apart into a few pieces the way it wants to come apart right I'm gonna take one of these guys I'm gonna peel it peels the first thing that's a person billing thing we got a deal with the that delicious flavor out of ginger the spoon is the ultimate tool to peel your ginger you can use a peeler and you can fuss around with it but you always end up taking off too much and it's tough to get into a little nooks and crannies on this guy you can use a paring knife that works okay too but it's easy to take off to months also easy to cut yourself with it so if you hold the spoon sort of in your hand with the head of a spoon behind your index finger and use the edge here and you work towards your own thumb it scrapes off really really really easily look at what I'm doing here I'm getting all of his ginger hitting my cutting board it's just skinny there's no flesh coming off of there I'm not gonna cut myself with it I mean I'm probably not gonna cut myself with this pillow and put it past me but it's really easy to do all that skin just kind of slips off if you have bought an excess of ginger if you have too much ginger you can pop it into the freezer in a ziplock bag and it actually holds up for a couple of months so keep that in mind you don't want to waste food right so I got all this peel off here that's super super easy to do this so your ultimate tool for peeling ginger the next thing we got to deal with this guy kind of like celery it's got these fibers so these fibers running through it so if you're like roasted of beef or something like that if you got a nice pot roast you always want to cut the meat against the grain because if you cut it with the grain or you pop it in your mouth they start chewing it's gonna be really really chewy it's gonna take a while to process it right but if I cut against the grain against all of these little pieces of string essentially that are in here it's gonna be way way way more tender so I'm gonna grab my Nikki area here this is an awesome tool for doing this so first of all you want to determine what way the grain is running if you bought a piece of ginger and it's kinda long you can sort of assume that the grain is running up and down super super easy to figure out you also let's look at I can see on this guy there's some little hairs coming off on the top here I can see some hairs on the bottom so I can sort of assume the grave is running vertically this way so I'm gonna do is take one cut with the green one with the grain so that I have a nice flat surface to put this guy down on there we go nice flat surface I'm now going to position my claw over it and just like with my broccoli stem I want to slice this guy up superdude birth in really really thin is what we're going for here so when I'm stir-frying or if I'm making a curry if I'm gonna put this into a pan in any way I don't really like to chop it all up really finely I like to get a nice thin slice on it because once it hits that hot oil once it starts getting tossed around in that pan it's going to start to mellow out its gonna give up a little bit of that flavor it's actually gonna take on a pretty nice texture if I were to taste one of these super thin pieces that's really spicy it's really really spicy what you've got it super thin like that oh my god but you don't remember is gonna cook super fast and you do it that way so you're gonna end up with all this mace coach ginger flavor sort of making this beautiful Malone with your sauce in there and you end up with a nice texture on that guy this is the ultimate way to slice up ginger when you're making a stir-fry if you can use the ginger raw one of the best ways to do it is to grab like a microplane or a grater and just sort of do it up that way but I find that when you're cooking your ginger this is the best way to go beautiful just like that all right so one thing we haven't really talked about yet it's first and herbs are a classic pitfall if you're if you're if you're chopping up hurts you want to be nice and gentle with them we're not eating herbs for sustenance it's not like oh I go to the restaurant oh I'll have the parsley please no no the parsley is sort of there but it's like it's playing a role and we want to be gentle with it because the reason these guys taste good is because of the oil in the leaves the oil and the leaves in the stem that's why it tastes nice so if I really mash in this guy like if I take my knife and I'm doing one hand on top and I'm really just just mashing this guy up I'm gonna push all of the oil out you know with a big weird green stain on your cutting board and your food doesn't have the same flavor to it so I want to be nice and gentle with this stuff so what I typically like to do I'll get rid of the stem the lion's share of the stem there with that rubber band around it that can go into my stock take the rubber band off but I can go into your stocks may I grab a little bundle of this guy I'm gonna chop it all up let's grab a little bundle here so what I'd like to do at this point is go through and take all of the leaves off of most of the stem a little bit like that is fine I just want to get most of the stem dealt with it's not thick through this real quick and up with a nice little pile on my board so the stems actually have quite a lot of flavor in them so I do like to you as those in other ways primarily in my stock but what I want with this for my nice simple salsa here is a nice soft texture which that stem simply doesn't have the leaves are nice and soft as long as we work with them properly and you get a nice texture a nice flavor out of those guys so we want to avoid being overtly rough with this stuff here so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take my non-dominant hand I'm gonna pick it up nice and simply pick it up and put it into my little fist around that guy I'm not swishing it I'm being gentle it's a nice gentle fist which I then put down on the cutting board looks like that right using my other hand I sort of steady it try to pinch it as well as I can in my claw here with that lead knuckle at the top this is step number one I just want to sort of make it a little bit more malleable here I take a few slices using that claw don't worry about getting it super super super thin at this point we just want to sort of get it into a nice little workable pile will you get that pile a nice little bit of height so this is the tricky part this is the part that takes a little bit of judgement you want to be really gentle with your knife and this shape of knife is specifically great for this exact task or to do something called a mill chopping so once you start hearing that means it's time to push it back into a pile really really nice and gentle so this method does take a little bit more time than just going to town or throw it in the food processor or something like that but it's gonna read render you much more delicious results you can really smell that coming to the air right now that really nice sort of fresh parsley really gentle aroma there we go super super fine to dust nice soft parsley so there's a little singing among restaurant chairs of a finer the parsley the finer the restaurant I don't know if any of you guys out there have ever worked at a restaurant before but chopping parsley is a pretty big part of the job and in fine dining if you ever do work in a restaurant under no circumstances should you let anybody know that you're any good at this otherwise you know that's going to be the parsley person for the rest of your friggin life if you take a closer look here I on the parcel my hand no weird green stain on my cutting board perfect look at that it's so nice and gentle when you do it this way you use a sharp knife you use it gently you don't end up with that big thing on your cutting boards you gotta clean up afterwards you get a lot of flavor out of this stuff beautiful so one of the most underutilized vegetables in the home kitchen today I think is the mighty shout a shallot kind of looks like an onion the kinda tastes like garlic it's a little bit more of a bass tone it looks like an onion so we're gonna chop it up similar to the way that we did the onion first thing I'm gonna do is take off all the stuff that I do not want to eat so the top the bottom I'm going to take this guide straight in half just like I did with my onion and then I'm gonna peel and watch out though these guys can be a little bit of a pain to feel sometimes that skin is really stubborn I was gonna do half a shot happy shell it's plenty shallots have a lot of flavor you don't want to be doing a whole lot of shell in any single recipe so remember want me to the onion we did those radial cuts those sort of angles cuts through that guy we're gonna do something similar with this guy but it doesn't need to be quite so precise I'm gonna take this guy and I'm gonna do that same sort of idea where I don't cut all the way through this five cuts there's fine and then I'm gonna do sort of a rough chop a rough dice with this guy there you go so there is nothing special to look at right now it's sort of a big chunky little thing there the way that I like to chop this guy have a sort of like a cross between the way I chop up my onions and my bars like once I got this guy sort of roughly chopped I just sort of put it in the middle of my board give it a little bit of height there then I sort of mill chop over it just like so keep wiping and off your blade and pushing it down onto the cutting board get a nice little pile there before long it's a mr. shrink it's gonna get nice and little those were the Curie's come in I always cry when I'm talking about I guess that's just life right so keep going repeat that process push it into a little file milk chomping overweight until you decide that it's done what I what I see nice little pieces if I don't see any big giant chunks that I know are gonna be unpleasant to bite into that's when I stop you do get to a point of diminishing returns with this guy so if you chop it up for too long you're gonna just end up turning it to mulch is this gonna sorta end up as ambush and all of that flavor just like the verbs all that flavor is gonna end up on your cutting board and it's not gonna end up in your mouth Oh cheering up here guys there we go beautiful nice mince tough shallot they're perfect for a tabbouleh or a salsa or something along those lines so I saved the best for last the tomato the mighty tomato we always have tomatoes on hand here at night we're just show people how extraordinarily sharp our knives are because this is sort of a tricky skin they cut through they actually wax them so they have a longer shelf life you need a really really sharp edge to get through that guy so let's have a feel here is no problem super easy right so what I want to do for my sauce are my tabbouleh or whatever I'm making here if I don't want it to be too goopy what I want to do is get rid of all of this seed on the inside here all of these seeds and all this goop or this gonna turn into soup so I'm going to do something called tomato concassé so to do a proper tomato concassé you would first have to peel your tomatoes which involves scoring a little X into the bottom blanching them in boiling water shocking them in cold water and then peeling the skin off we're not gonna bother with that though where does making salsa that's not necessary what I do is cut them in half and then I cut them in quarters notice how I'm not cutting into the skin side I'm cutting into the flesh side here way safer that way so your knight doesn't skid around on that skin so at this point it's really easy to see this is what we want down at the bottom here that's sort of like it's like the shell and we're almost gonna fillet these guys and what I don't want is the goopy stuff up here so I bring it sort of to the edge of my board and I full a time out I started an angle and then I level it back down I make sure to point the stem off to my left so that I can cut straight out by the way if you're left-handed you want to point the stem to you right so then I end up with my tomato inner and my tomato odered there we go super simple the tomato innards by the way you can still totally utilize tomato sauce perfect for that sort of thing they can also go into your stock tomatoes are awesome in stock especially if you're making a dark sock with roasted bones that's always a great ingredient to pop in there there we go I got my nice little Tomatoes here I got my shells what I'm gonna do with this guy is julienne so first we julienne then we dice so what these guys don't want to be really really careful I always want to have that skin down towards the board because if it's facing up like that my knife will slide around on it I run the risk of cutting myself a little bit more easily which sucks obviously we don't want to do that so I'm gonna cut this into maybe I don't know four or five pieces there a little tomato four pieces I line them up and then I dice them super easy there so what you choose to do with your tomato and your shallot your hurts it's entirely up to you you can tell me to squeeze some fresh lime some salt a little bit of olive oil in there and then whips it on up and you got yourself a really nice simple salsa you could put some chopped mint in there and then do that makes it to coulis just sort of a nice melange of it there's melange of flavors in there and we can do whatever we like with that well thanks a lot for watching guys that was a lot of fun and I hope you took something away from the class some key points that you always want to remember use a sharp knife all of these techniques are they talking about you've gotta have a sharp knife to use them I try to manipulate the food in a way so that it sort of sits flat and stable on your cutting board before you start going to town on it that's gonna reduce the risk of injury by a great great great margin use proper tools use a proper cutting board always have a rag on hand to clean up and keep your station nice and clean at all times make the best utilization of your space it's it's simple stuff but what it really requires the most important thing here is to practice cook at home try to cook at home at least four nights a week it's a great skill to have you can develop a better half you'll eat better overall awesome stuff if you have any more questions always visit my floor comm we're more than happy to help with any queries that you have thanks a lot for watching have a great day

Channel: Knifewear

Views: 83,402

Keywords: knifewear, Japanese knife, japan, blacksmith

Id: FuGZv_G5FlM

Length: 41min 30sec (2490 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020