Category:
Introduction

On the Board

It is true that appliances exists that can slice and dice, crush and grate, whirl and gyrate just about anything. Often these things remain unused under the counter because there is so much extra labour involved with cleaning them afterward. It's usually faster, once you've had the hang of it, to chop, dice and mince things up yourself, quickly and with a minimum of fuss.

At the cutting board:

Although the technique for using the chef’s knife and the choy doh (Chinese broad knife) differ somewhat at the knife hand, the actions and attitude of the board hand are pretty much the same.

The middle phalanges of the fingers of the hand holding the food are completely perpendicular to the cutting board, and serve as a guide for the knife. The actual fingertips themselves are curled slightly back under the palm, to bring them even further from the guillotine. The thumb is always kept behind the fingers. It can be used there to control the food to be cut, but never extends into the danger zone.

The chef’s knife:

Curl your thumb and first two fingers around the haft of the knife. Keep your elbow relaxed at your side, and your wrist straight.

Put the tip of the knife on the board, and pivot the edge down and through the produce like a guillotine blade. Most cooks use an almost imperceptible drawing back of the blade at the top, and a similar flourish of forward motion right at the end of the cut, but the blade must only just kiss the wood in any event. Lift the blade and push the next cut-line under with your other hand. The thickness of the food being sliced determines where along the length of the blade you rest it as well as how high you must raise the edge. The blade never rises high enough for the edge to clear the knuckles. If the piece of food is so high that the other hand comes to be below the edge, support the food securely so that it cannot roll around, perhaps on a towel, or by slicing a flat plane into it, and use one hand at either end of the knife.

Choy doh:

This style of knife, although commonly termed a cleaver in semiotically-challenged Anglic usage, is a well evolved kitchen implement. One can do with it all that is possible with the chef’s knife, and much more besides. The first mode, like that of the chef’s knife, is well suited to microtome-thin slicing and mincing. Leaving the tip of the blade on the board, raise the near end and bring it down through the food, with a very slight forward push at the bottom of the stroke.
Although difficult to describe, the subtlest of shifts forward and back in a kind of rocking motion may help to deal with slippery subjects.

The second method is to actually lift the entire knife just slightly above the board and bring it down through the food with a controlled chopping motion. The blade must never be brought above the level of the other hand’s knuckles, while the perpendicular second joints of the fingers maintain a guide surface for the travel of the knife. With practice, this can be very fast and safe. This is the main mode. Again, you know you're doing it right when the blade only impacts the cutting board very much like a caress.

The large flat of the blade of the choy doh makes it extremely useful. You can crush a clove of garlic or bruise a piece of ginger root, but its foremost efficiency is that just cut items can be swept up onto the flat of the blade and transported to the pot. You don’t have to put the knife down, get a bowl, put the food in it, and carry it to the next stage of the recipe.

Sharp tips:

Keep your blades sharp. Dull knives are dangerous.

Do not use the edge of your knives to scrape up food that you are working on. Rather use the back of the blade against the board. This will preserve the edge.

When picking up food with the choy doh, lay it’s blade down at an acute angle to the board, and sweep the food onto it with your other hand, rather than scraping it under the food. You’ll be eating fragments of the cutting board if you do that.

The Oriental style of cutting board is usually a slice through the bole of a tree. It can be turned by quarters to facilitate chopping. Unfortunately, it must be kept soaking in water, or it will check (crack) to the point of unusability. Like the best butcher block construction, this has you cutting into the end grain, which is more forgiving of the edge of your blade.
Your other choices are end-grain butchers block material, or just plain hardwood boards, although the end-grain products dull ones knives less quickly than the slab-cut wood. Softwood will disintegrate into your food under even moderate use and plywood is full of glue. The polypropylene cutting boards you will see in use in commercial establishments are said to require hypochlorites for their sterilization. Wooden boards, on the other hand, because of their vascular properties, more or less sterilize themselves upon drying.

Table of Contents

More Intro:

On Frugality | On Cookery | Batterie de Cuisine | Keeping it Fresh | Keeping it Dried | On Nightshades | On Water | On Sourdough | On Pizza | Arthritis in the Kitchen |