4ST EDITION Vol. 2 Technique

The Way You
Chop Onions
Makes Me Cry
When using a kitchen knife there are a few important
things to remember: grip, sharpness, type of cut for
your particular dish, and choice of knife. All of which
help in making your kitchen safer and more efficient.
Plus, you’ll achieve better tasting food.
Type of cut
There are many different types of cut with elongated
and fancy names which can be daunting when read
straight from a recipe book. The three main ones you
need for the majority of your cooking: sliced, diced
and julienne. When cooking a meal, as a general
rule you would stick to one cutting style throughout the
dish. The easiest cut is generally to cut across grain of
your food into evenly sized pieces, measured by height,
thickness or weight. An example of this might be slicing
celery for a base flavour in a bolognese, along with your
carrots and onion. To dice an onion, you would make
cuts along the halved onion (making sure the root is still
holding it all together), then make a cut horizontally
through the onion and finally vertically down to make
each part into evenly sized squares. (See the top three
images for reference). You could also dice a pepper for
example by first using a julienne cut; making it into
evenly sized match stick shapes (see image right) and
then to dice it simply cut along the sticks to make them
small evenly sized cubes. Julienne is great for stir fry and
is often used in Asian cuisine.
Grip
When holding a sharp knife you are of course at risk
of cutting yourself. (Make sure you understand the
instructions completely before handling any sharp
knives, and please be careful!) What we want is
maximum control over the blade, in order to minimise
risk. A knife is made up of two main parts, the handle
and the blade. Most people assume to hold the handle
and cut with the blade. Which makes a lot of sense,
right? However, maybe not so obvious is that you will
have the greatest control of the knife by holding it with
thumb and forefinger on the top of the blade and the
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