A common issue when it comes to learning to properly use a chef’s knife is the waste of ingredients. You can practice without going through a mountain of onions, carrots and potatoes. Simply cut up a piece of fruit or a small squash. They are inexpensive and will allow you to hone your knife skills. Even better, use them in a meal when you are done. You can also cut up a baguette. Bread is cheap and can be used to make bread crumbs or croutons.
You know how people say to invest in a good chef’s knife because it makes cooking so much easier? This is true. But it is only true when you have practiced cutting. When you are first learning, I don’t want you to worry about how fast you are, I want you to worry about how well you are cutting. I want you to take a single, hard root, like a carrot or a potato, and practice cutting it into slices all the same size. Notice how the knife feels as it slices through the root. Notice how the slices stack on top of each other.
Now, grip. It’s crucial but often neglected. So your top hand holds the handle taut but not clenched and your fingers touch the blade just ahead of the handle. Your bottom hand curls, with the tips of your fingers bent back and out of the way and your knuckles creating a guard. When you first start out, you may feel more comfortable leaving your fingers flat against the vegetable. But this will give you less control over your knife and increase the chances of the blade slipping. If this feels awkward, just try cutting slowly and focus on getting your fingers into position. You’ll need to work on cutting carefully long before you need to work on cutting quickly. Attempting to cut quickly at first will give you a lot of mangled vegetables and it will make you very frustrated.
Even a quick practice session of 15 minutes can be had before you have to start making dinner. The first five minutes slicing something into coins. The next five minutes slicing those coins into sticks. The last five minutes slicing those sticks into small pieces. It’s a common way to have to cut things, and it’s a good way to learn what happens to shapes. If your hands start to get tired or you’re making ugly cuts, take a minute to rest, wiggle your hands, and square up your stance again. The longer you cut with a bad posture, the harder it will be to shake later.
The most frequent error is chopping straight down, rather than employing a rocking motion that rolls along the blade’s curve. Straight down crushes tender ingredients, while also taking more force. To break this habit, lay the blade’s tip on the board, and hinge the knife back and forth by moving the handle in a smooth arc. This way, as the knife moves down, the blade travels forward, too. With some herbs or green onions, practice a few slow, forceless rolls to establish a rhythm.
The sign that you’re improving is that prep work is getting calmer, neater, and more controlled. There’s less food scattered all over the cutting board. The pieces look more uniform and you have fewer scraps. You’re getting more comfortable, so time yourself when you’re chopping a given quantity of something and keep the quality the same. You don’t need to go super fast, but you need to maintain your quality at a bit of a hurry, because in a kitchen, your knives still have to work when you’re busy and tired.