Basic Knife Cuts

Featured Pro: Curtis Stone
Category: Cooking
Time: 2:21


CURTIS STONE: Hey, I’m Curtis Stone. I’ve got a great GMC Trade Secret which will demystify a little bit of that French terminology that can creep into recipes for you.

Now, basically, here in front of me I’ve got few different cuts. This down here is the sort of – it’s the size of a matchstick. It’s a sixteenth of an inch. It’s called julienne. Next to that is a brunoire, and that’s basically these little matchsticks, or the julienne, cut across so you get a little fine dice.

Over here we’ve got some batonnets, and then they’ve been cut into a larger dice. So basically all you need to know is a brunoire is a fine dice, a julienne is a matchstick, and a batonnet is the bigger one. And our larger dice is the bigger stuff.

Now, you can imagine, if you tried to cook these little batonnets and it said cook for a minute and you cooked those for a minute, but you cut it wrong, it would still be raw. So the important thing is that you get the right cut so that the cooking time is accurate.

All right, let me show you how you do it. You get something like a carrot. Now, if you want to cut a julienne, what you would normally do is cut one piece off, okay. And you can have that to nibble on while you’re cooking. And then the flat side of the carrot now becomes stable. You then cut that into thin little pieces, and you then turn those over and cut them into julienne. Once you’ve cut it into the julienne, you could, if you wanted, then cut it into a brunoire.

Okay, now, these days we’re a little bit lazy and people have made things a little bit easier for us, so you can pick up little tools like this, which are a julienner. So what you do is just like you’d use a vegetable peeler. You pull it across the carrot, and what it actually does is cut you into a julienne.

So what you want to do next is just gather up those little fine strips or the julienne, and then cut across them if you want to fine dice. And you end up with exactly the same thing that you would if you were doing it all manually.

So cutting a fine dice or a julienne has been made a little bit easier by some handy little kitchen gadgets. Now, don’t be bamboozled by the terminology. All you need to know is a julienne or a fine dice cooks really quickly, or a batonnet or a larger dice will take a little bit more cooking. So that’s the only really important thing.

I’m Curtis Stone, and that’s your GMC Trade Secret.