Safe Cutting Techniques

Featured Pro: Curtis Stone
Category: Cooking
Time: 2:46


CURTIS STONE: Hey, I’m Curtis Stone. I’ve got a great GMC Trade Secret for you about how to use your knife properly. It’s all about safe cutting techniques.

Now, the most important thing when you’re using your knife is to make sure it’s sharp. Let me explain it. If your knife’s nice and sharp, when you saw, right, this is the motion you’re going to use. That’s going to do the work for you. So the sharpness of the blade is going to cut through whatever it is that you’re cutting. If it’s not sharp, you’re going to have to use force, and then things get a little bit wobbly, and that’s when you can cut something that you don’t want to cut.

Now, the most important thing when you’re cutting something is you give yourself an even thing to cut. So cut an onion, for instance, in half, right, so then it’s nice and flat and it’s stable. Then just take the top off; leave the root attached. You might want to just snip that little piece off. But leave it attached, because what’s going to happen then is it’s going to hold itself together so you can cut it properly. When you hold it, put your thumb just up there on the blade of the knife and make sure it’s really stable in your hand.

Now, there’s three basic sections to the knife: The front – here is the tip, okay; the midsection goes from the end of the tip to the start of the heel, so about there; and then the heel of the knife is just this little part down here at the end. So the tip’s used for cutting something that you want to keep whole. All right, now, that’s something like an onion, so the tip would be used for something like this where you’re just using this end part of the knife, just there.

Okay, now, the midsection is more for slicing. So the midsection of the knife is there, so when you’re cutting an onion, you’d use the sharpness of that midsection just to go through it like that. Or for something like slicing a tomato, that’s what you’re going to use. So see how easy. You don’t have to use virtually any pressure. I can do it with just two fingers – look at that – because the blade’s nice and sharp.

Now, when it comes time to slice the onion, again, you’re going to use the midsection and you’re going to cut that into a nice dice, right? Now, the time that you’re going to use the heel of the knife is when you want to chop. So if you’re going to do something like chopped parsley, you tear off your parsley and then we’re going to go for the heel, which is this piece down here. And what you do is you use the weight of the knife and you just let it rock, okay. So we’re just going to use this piece here, the heel. So then you use the weight and you just rock over the top of that.

Now, on this side, what you need to do is just hold your fingers, the tips of your fingers, back a little bit and let that part of your finger push against the blade of the knife. That way you’re never going to cut this part off, and that’s important. So let me show you that bit. You just push the blade up against there on your finger and then, like I said, just do that rocking. So there you go, beautiful chopped parsley.

That’s your GMC Trade Secret, presented by the Yukon hybrid.