Husbands and KnivesCan a book teach my husband to dice onions, slice bagels, and core strawberries?
Posted Wednesday, July 2, 2008, at 6:31 AM ET
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StumbleUponThe roast chicken test wasn't really fair—I picked up two birds from the grocery store that were so plumped with fillers and overcooked they fell apart as soon as he touched them with a knife. Besides, even before reading the book and watching the video, Andrew already had the bird-carving basics down, though he needed some more practice in skimming the knife close to the rib bones to minimize wasted breast meat. A minor complaint from me: Weinstein did not remind newbie carvers to pay particular attention to the "oyster" of the chicken—the tasty morsel of flesh that clings to the top of the thigh, and is easily lost if the carver does not keep it in mind.
Weinstein's scary-looking method for hulling strawberries improved Andrew's technique, which had involved rolling the berries on a cutting board while awkwardly spearing them with a paring knife. Weinstein recommends pinching the knife blade and turning the strawberry around it. It worked nicely, though Andrew isn't ready to change his working habits just to beautify our 3-year-old's lunch box.
The biggest teaching triumph came with the onion—one of the most common items cut in the kitchen, and one that I see bungled regularly by amateur cooks. Andrew's pre-Weinstein cuts were awkward and haphazard, but he quickly got the gist of leaving the onion connected at the root end, crosshatching it, and then slicing it into regular-sized pieces. Weinstein didn't invent this method but he communicates it well, and Andrew took to it right away.
Weinstein has impressively managed to put words to motions that I could only learn by watching and doing. Like any tennis coach worth his salt, he talks of follow-through in the basic knife stroke—"this is really a continuous, elliptical sequence of motions, not a push-stop-pull-stop sequence." Yet as I watched Andrew work, I was often tempted to jump in and correct his little inefficiencies—it's one thing to read about "elliptical sequences," and quite another to execute such a maneuver without someone on hand to explain what you're doing wrong. I also couldn't help but think that in the end, Andrew would need to set aside Weinstein's book and just practice. Somewhere around the 100th minced clove of garlic, he'll get the essence of the action. By the 1,000th, he'll stop thinking about what he's doing.
Mastering Knife Skills is not really for accomplished blade-handlers—a large portion of the book is devoted to elementary purchasing information, and when it comes to cutting techniques, Weinstein tries to keep the book uncomplicated and unintimidating by winnowing down the available information. He doesn't tell you how to bone out a leg of lamb, because that's something you'd probably have your butcher do. But he leaves out a few handy techniques: how to prepare an artichoke, for example; how to handle a pear's funky core; or how to portion a fish once you've filleted it. On a larger scale, it would also be helpful to have some information on knife skills in context: how to manage your cutting board as you scale up an operation like peeling and slicing multiple onions for a soup. (Perform each step of the operation to all of the onions before moving on to the next step.) This systematic stuff is harder to find for free on the Web, unlike, say, the technique for dicing an onion, which can be had in countless variations, both in still photos and in video form.
Despite my quibbles, I'm grateful to Weinstein for giving Andrew a primer in how to chop an onion safely, something I never managed to do in the 16-odd years we've been together. Now if I can just keep him from gesticulating wildly with our 10-inch chef's knife as he does it, our kitchen will be a safer place.
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Comment from the Fray
They teach chefs to stand by the garbage sometimes to see where their profits are going... but this only works when margins are chef-knife thin or portions are being done by the hundreds. In fact, keeping staff on for slow nights, preparing things that have to be ready but can't be kept, rent, and various other frictions take more out of a restaurant than simple prep waste.
This is one of the things that explains why the pro cook will slice a good chunk out of some vegetable to stabilize it on the board and speed the chopping. Food is cheap relative to prep time and accidents. Getting 10% more out of each cucumber won't solve a prep cook getting cut.
The home cook thinks differently. They don't square off vegetable to dice it and discard all the curved parts. The waste would be frightening. And so, shapes are uneven and cutting relatively slow...
--BenK
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