Knife skills

Good knife skills are absolutely essential to being a good cook.  Knife skills are at once:

1.  The most important (in my opinion) physical skill in the kitchen, EASILY
2.  The most daunting thing to most people who are afraid to cook
3.  Quite easily improved in a short amount of time.

I wouldn't dare try to describe how you should be using your knife in a blog; there are numerous other outlets where you can watch tutorial videos.  I know there are some at foodnetwork.com, and I'd bet you could find some on YouTube.  If you can find it, there's an episode of Good Eats where Alton Brown goes over the basics of teaching children to cook.  Besides showing how to use a knife, he covers some safety issues as well.

More specifically, I refer to knife skills as more than just cutting stuff up.  Yes, sometimes you just want to chop something into smaller pieces.  But most times, precise cuts are desired, and yes, it does affect the final product.

For example, when you are dicing vegetables (cutting into small cubes), the aim is to have all the pieces the same size.  This promotes even cooking: each piece gets cooked to the same level of doneness.  You also want to avoid having pieces being larger than bite size, or to be too large a chunk of something in comparison to the other pieces.  For example, an overly big piece of bacon may make that particular mouthful of food too salty or too fatty.

Other times, the precision of your cuts affects the way your dish looks.  It may not necessarily affect the overall flavor, but we also eat with our eyes.  Julienned vegetables or herbs look sloppy if the pieces vary greatly in size.

But as I mentioned above, knife skills get honed pretty quickly.  Like everything else in life, it helps that you have the confidence that you will improve, and trust that your effort will be worth the investment in time.  Once you feel that cutting up a bunch of ingredients is not a big deal, you'll be surprised at how much more you're willing to cook.

I know some people see a recipe and get discouraged when they see a laundry list of vegetables that need to be broken down.  But I actually enjoy doing that stuff - I find all that slicing, dicing, and julienning quite relaxing, almost meditative.

Once you've conquered your fear of doing knife work, so many things open up.  All the aromatics - onions, garlic, celery, peppers - they will impart their flavors so much better with quality knife work.  Vegetables in a stir fry will cook more evenly, and can even look prettier because of the cook's skill with a knife.  And through the understanding of knife cuts, you can manipulate the texture of your foods - get just the right amount of crunch in that very same stir fry.

As I mentioned in a previous post, you don't need no stinkin' Slap Chop; it is imprecise and a waste of money.  Vince mentions how easy it is to clean.  There is NO WAY that it's easier to clean than a knife.