Knife Skills 101: Cut Safer and Smarter | In the Kitchen

Today we're going to be talking about knife skills. A dull knife is actually much more dangerous to you than a sharp knife.

Absolutely.

Even though a sharper knife is sharper, it's easier to cut things, and you would think that means it's easier to cut you, but if you think about when you're trying to cut something with a really dull knife and you have to kind of jam it in there, that's when most knife accidents happen, is that not true?

No, that's absolutely true.

So really important stuff.

This is actually— it's called a steel, and this comes Uh, with many knife kits, um, but sometimes you do have to buy it separately. This does not actually sharpen the knife, so if your knife is dull, this will not sharpen it. What this does is it hones it, and what that means is that when you go to sharpen this knife, whether it's professionally or with a sharpening stone, you're shaving bits of metal off this knife to get it to this sharp point. Once you have the sharp point, you can then use this honing, the steel, to hone and keep that sharpness. It won't keep it forever, but it will keep it longer than if you did not use this. With this type of knife, you want to do about 24 degrees.

And when he says 24 degrees, he's talking about that little tiny edge right on the end of the knife, because that's actually the part that's sharp.

If you have your steel straight, straight up, then if you put the knife here, we're at 90 degrees. So half of 90 is about there, and that's 45 degrees. So now we're trying to get to 24. So just to play, you know, just to keep it simple, we're going to pretend that 45 is about 50, and half of 50 is 25, right? So now we're going to— we're at half of 90, and now we're going to go half of 45. Okay, so we're right there. So give or take a few degrees, you can move it a little bit if you want, but that's basically what the angle that you want to hone your knife at. And what you're going to then do is you're going to start from the back and you're going to do the other side. I'm trying to keep a constant pressure, and you really only need to do about 2, 3 times on each side. Now we have a couple of steels here. This steel is flat and this one's round. Most of you probably have this, this type, but they do the same thing. So you want to practice on this one right here?

I'll try this one. So I go in at 90 degrees. 90 degrees, half of that, and then about half of that. And you just start right from the back, the bottom.

There's lots of terms. I could be teaching you the terms of the knife and the proper, proper words, but you know, we want to really keep cooking fun, but we also want to make it safe, and that's why it's very important to have sharp knives.

Makes a big difference.

Yeah, you can actually feel it. Did you hear that noise when Margaret put her finger over the blade like that? It's like a, yeah, it's like a ding, it's like a little noise, and that tells you that the edge is there. If it was dull, you wouldn't hear that.

And remember, this doesn't sharpen, it just hones, so you want to get your knives, if they're right now dull, you want to go get them professionally sharpened first and then do this as a maintenance.

I'm going to show you a couple things real quick. Right here we have a really sturdy knife board. This one is made of wood, and you don't have to actually put anything under this because it's It's really thick and sturdy. However, if you were using a smaller board, something that could shift around on you, one of the tricks is you actually take some paper towels and you just kind of quickly wet them. And then what you do is you unfold them out and then you put them underneath the board, and it will actually create a little bit of friction. But you don't want to have them uneven. 'Cause then you're gonna make an uneven board. And you just go like that and then put your thing— yep. And it actually will keep it from moving around, which you really don't want to do.

Yeah.

It's a little trick that they use in kitchens. What you want to do is you always want to have that tip ideally on the board. So that board— that tip stays on the board and you're just following the rocking motion of the blade. You feel that?

Very different from—

Yeah.

Not as stable.

Definitely.

This is really stable.

And it's not going to go anywhere. Now some people, you know, you always hold the knife by the handle. Some people put their hands a little bit higher up here, but what you want to do is worry about this hand, because this hand is going to be pretty safe since it's on the knife. It's this hand that kind of, you know, we put fingers— I mean, a lot of times when Margaret's cutting, I have to admit I get really nervous because I feel like she's going to cut off a finger. So I'm always kind of talking about what?

The claw.

The claw. What we do with the claw is we're actually— the whole point of the claw is to make it so that our fingers, the tips of our fingers, are tucked. Because if those are tucked, what happens is you create this flat edge right here on your knuckle. And if you have a flat edge and you keep this tip of this blade on the board, there's no way that you're going to cut your fingers. Because basically that flat edge of your knuckle and your finger is hitting the side of the blade, which is not sharp at all, right? It's actually smooth and will glide right down your finger. What's really nice is when you have any sort of produce that has a root, an end, right? Basically you can leave that end on and then cut up to it, and you'll see you will actually make it a lot easier to dice or to cut things.

Very different from how I used to do things before. Before I met Chef James, my first step when I was going to cut a zucchini would be to go ch-ch and cut that little end bit right off. Now, that's the last thing I do, and I use that with my newly learned claw.

I'm going to show you with a zucchini and a yellow onion. Whenever you have a round vegetable or fruit, you don't want to cut it round. You want a flat end because the flat end is more stable. So now I have a flat edge. And then I'm going to cut. Let's say what I want to do is I'm dicing this, okay? So I'm dicing it, but I left this part on. So right now it's being held together. It's being held together for me. So now I'm going to actually cut. I'm going to cut the other way. So now what I have is I kind of have— I've cut it exactly how I want it. And now I'm going to use my claw to keep it all in place, and I'm going to dice it. And this is where a sharp knife is really helpful, because if this knife was dull, it would slip. And look at how I'm— basically it's dicing for me. I don't have to cut this again. After I've cut it off the onion, I don't have to go back and cut it anymore. And you basically are left with the— you're already— your diced onions. So, what I'm gonna do is similar to what I did with the onion. I'm cutting, um, the thickness of the piece that I want it to be. And so I just made, uh, 4 cuts, or 3 cuts, but it creates 4 pieces. And see how they're still attached? And I'm creating these little sticks.

Look at how fast you just did that. No time at all.

No time. The thing with lettuce that you want to be careful of is you don't want to cut it until you, you need to use it, because when you cut it with a steel blade, it will actually start to oxidize, which is where you start seeing the brown, the brown pieces start coming in wherever you cut.

If you know how to chop things properly, not only do you reduce your risk of chopping yourself in the process, you also speed up the whole prep time of making whatever it is you're making. So, you know, none of us want to spend our whole life in the kitchen, as much as we love cooking. So if you know how to chop properly, you know how to use good knife skills, then you just speed up your time massively. Also, as I've learned from Chef James, If you know how to cut things properly, you can actually improve the taste of the food. You know, there's certain things that I used to chop in way too big chunks because chopping them too little felt like too much time, partly because I didn't know how to do it.

When you're cutting tomatoes, because they have such smooth skins, it's actually really helpful to use a serrated knife. Cut it in half to get that flat part down on the board. And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna dice this tomato because we're gonna use it in like a, I don't know, a ceviche. So I went ahead and I left the tips and I got my little talking tomato, and then now I'm going to— Okay, and now And I'm gonna just cut it to the size I want, and I'm using my claw to keep all the pieces together.