7 essential ways to cut vegetables
In the kitchen, cutting vegetables is just as essential as cooking, seasoning or even mixing flavors. Learning to master the different techniques means being able to bring different textures and different aspects to all your dishes, and thus to vary the pleasures on a daily basis!
Here we talk about different ways to cut fruits & vegetables with a slicer (also called chef’s knife or kitchen knife!).
Julienne involves cutting vegetables into thin matchstick-sized sticks. It is generally used to make a garnish made up of various vegetables to accompany fish, or in certain Asian preparations such as spring rolls.
Cutting in a whistle, or on a bevel, is like cutting the vegetables with an angle. This allows you to create larger vegetable slices. Long and thin vegetables (carrots, leeks) are cut in bevel, in order to bring a variation of textures and a different aesthetic to the plate.
Chiffonade is specific to leafy vegetables like lettuce, cabbage, spinach, etc. It consists of rolling up the leaves of the vegetable in question to form a roll that is then cut into strips. The result is thin strips that show off the texture of the leaf nicely.
This technique consists in cutting fairly roughly into cubes or pyramids.
It is used for cooking vegetables intended to be blended for a soup or mashed.
This method is used to finely cut aromatic herbs.
“Chiseling” term is also used for onions and shallots: After sorting and rinsing the bulb, cut it in half through the ends. Then slice in small strips in the stem-root direction (without cutting the heel that we will throw away), then perpendicularly to make very small cubes.
The chiseled cut makes it possible to better dose the contribution of aromatic herbs.
“Cutting in brunoise” means cutting into very small dice (2 to 3 mm wide). The brunoise is one of the fairly technical cuts, due to the degree of precision it requires.
To make a brunoise more easily, you can cut slices of vegetable with a mandolin first, then cut them again into thin strips lengthwise, and finally cut these strips widthwise.
The brunoise, by its finesse, makes it possible to make original accompaniments, and also serves as a base for making sauces, stuffings or for preparing flans, quiches, cakes…
It is a cut similar to the brunoise, but in which the pieces are cut into larger dice of about 1cm thick.
It is the cutting of “diced vegetables”, cooked in a homogeneous and aromatic way, to accompany meat and fish, and to make the famous sauce Mirepoix.
To facilitate cutting and be more precise, remember to maintain your knife well and above all to focus on quality! At Goyon-Chazeau, we offer several ranges of kitchen knives, ideal for learning how to better control each cut!
The vegetable knives : Use the right knife
Each of these cutting techniques will be made easier by using the good vegetable knife do to it.
The kitchen knife, also called chef’s knife, and the paring knife will be the most multipurpose.
The chiffonade, the chiseled cut, the brunoise will also be easily done with a Santoku.
You can peel your vegetables and turn them easily with a peeling knife.
And if in addition to vegetables you are cooking a side dish, discover our article about the best knives for cutting meat.
