Knife skills

Chef's knife

The most essential knife in your kitchen. With a wide blade that ranges from six to ten inches long, this knife is a workhorse meant for slicing and dicing fruit, veggies, meat, and more.

Serrated knife

This blade is handy for cutting a loaf of bread, slicing tomatoes, and working with any food that has one texture on the outside and another on the inside.

Paring knife

This two- to four-inch knife is perfect for smaller tasks, like peeling produce, coring tomatoes, and hulling strawberries. Its nimble size and narrow pointed tip lets you perform tasks with accuracy and precision.

Some cutting boards come with sufficient grips already on them. But if find that your cutting board moves around while using it, place a damp towel or paper towel underneath your board. You can also purhase an anti-slip mat. 

Pinch Grip: Pinch the blade where it meets the handle with your thumb and forefinger. This grip, the go-to for most cutting tasks, allows you to choke up on the blade to get leverage over the whole length of the knife.

Handle Grip: Grasp the knife firmly where the handle meets the blade. While this grip can often feel the most secure for inexperienced cooks, it doesn’t offer the control over the tip that is needed to make precision cuts. 

Create flat, stable surface by cutting food in half or removing thin slice from bottom. This will make the ingredient easier to chop. You can then rest the ingredient on this flat base for safer and quicker chopping

Curve your fingers into a claw on top of the food, making sure to tuck your thumb behind them and pressing down to hold the food in place. This position allows your knuckles to help guide the side of the blade while your fingertips stay out of harm’s way. With practice, your claw will move back in even increments after each cut, guiding the knife to make even slices.

Chopped: Large non-uniform pieces. Random shapes and sizes about 1/4″ in size or about the diameter of a dime. Chopping can be rough and less precise than dicing. 

Diced: Smaller and more uniform than chopping. Imagine the diameter of a pea (but squared). Dicing is usually called for in a recipe where the ingredients are uncooked like in salsas and picos. 

Minced: This is a very fine chop. It’s about as small as you can get. You do not need to focus on uniformity. 

Sliced: A general term that means to cut across the grain into thin, uniform pieces.