COOKING BASICS: VIDEOS
What’s below are kitchen or culinary basics—skills, techniques, trucs—foundations for good cooking, all and each. Some of these (for example, how to use a chef’s knife), we all would agree are necessary for nearly any cooking. Others, such as simply stabilizing a cutting board, some cooks have told me are tips that have proven to be more important than many others.
Links on this page are to videos on this site on the same topic.
1. How to use a chef’s knife.
No tool is more important in any kitchen than the chef’s knife; they come in various iterations, but they’re the first thing any cook reaches for most of the time. But it’s important to know how to hold one (really? something that basic? yep), how to use it differently on different foods (herbs, for example, as distinct from a potato). Plus, notes on this simple tool’s various facets or dimensions, which is to say, applications.
2. How to cut up an onion.
There are many ways to skin this cat, but I show you one. Keep in mind that considered, even across many, many cultures and their cuisines, onions are the most basic and the most common of the “aromatics.” It helps, then, to know how to slice into one.
A carrot? Really? Yes, because it’s hard, it isn’t stable on the cutting board, it rolls away when you apply your chef’s knife to it. It’s dangerous, this little orange thing. Learning how to cut up a carrot—safely—teaches you how to deal with other vegetables that you might be prepping that aren’t as difficult to cut up as the carrot.
4. What is chiffonade? And why is it so cool?
I appreciate cutting up herbs, leafy greens, even protein skins (fowl, hog, tofu) into what’s called “chiffonade,” a slicing technique that cuts into long, thin strips. It’s comely, it releases more flavor than other cuts, it’s cool.
5. Always stabilize the cutting board.
A board that slips out from under your prep work is even more dangerous than that carrot, ha! It’s so easy to stabilize the cutting board so that it’s a mere extension, a “lifting up” of the counter or work table itself. Place a moistened paper or cloth towel under the cutting board and it becomes, for all intents and purpose, immobilized. That’s what you and your knife want.