Hello! My name is Chris Klien, I am the Chef de Cuisine of Acadiana Restaurant, Washington DC, the heart of the Penn Quarter, doing some basic knife skills today. We are going to show you how to do a medium dice of celery.
First of all you need a celery stalk I have already cut it in half. I have trimmed the leaves, you see over here I have some celery. What we’ve done is, we’ve removed the leaves here, we’ve trimmed the tops, we’ve then washed the celery of course and then I’ve cut in half to make it more manageable. It makes it easier to manage if we cut in half. When you are dicing longer things, it is hard to get control of it.
We are going to start off. We are going to take this one piece of celery so it is very—you can see rocks a lot, we done want to cut ourselves. We are going to go ahead and cut in half. So cut in half in here, we already got a pretty thick fillet. It is about a quarter of an inch maybe. So, that is probably what we are going to do for a medium dice, quarter of an inch.
So, we are going to go ahead and do a julienne. Now, we are going to start off with a strip here and we are going to cut three. So, it is going to rocking a little bit because I have a big piece of celery right here. So, if you are not really comfortable with that, by all means, just take it down and cut it one more time in half. In that way, we can cut it in half and we can work a little bit easier.
We can go ahead and make the same cuts, equal in size and put them over there and as you can see, we have the exact same thing. We have cut this into like double julienne almost. This is a quarter of an inch cut, slices we have cut the fillets, we’ve gone down, we’ve made our incision down and we can manipulate it more by cutting it in half, so you don’t have to worry about the knife rocking.
We are now going to do the dice. We are going to take these, these sticks here and I’m going to cut just like that and then we are going to make sure that we cut the same ones. So take in the knife and squaring them up, make sure that we cut the exact same way. So, there we go, one more cut and then we will finish it up.
Now, if you want a very perfect medium dice, that is what it is and you get rid of the other pieces to the side. What we are going to do now is, we go ahead and take the larger once, which you can use as well, so say you didn’t want to do the mediums to cut in half, or you have the same thing. And then all I have to do is slice down. Here we have medium dice of celery.
Now, we are going to show you how to clean corn.