The first time I cooked a steak in a professional kitchen, I sliced my hand open. A couple minutes after our 5:30 opening, we got an order-fire for steak frites, medium rare. I started ripping a pan on the stove, took out two filets — anticipating another order — seasoned them and took a deep breath.
I had been avoiding working sauté for months. Our head chef kept nudging me in that direction, and I kept saying, “Oh, yeah, totally,” before coming up with last-minute excuses why someone else should do it. Cooking so many things on the fly at so many different temps freaked me out. But what freaked me out the most was working the station with the highest likelihood to let people down. If you over-season a salad you can whip up a replacement quickly on the fly. If you bust the steaks that are centering a big entree pick up, you’re in the weeds for the rest of service while the other cooks shake their heads in frustration.
“Five-out steak.”
I call the cue for the other cooks to drop fries and prep the side dishes. It’s burned into my skull that this thing costs $36. But everything feels right. It looks properly seared. The cake tester I just pressed against my lips indicates the right temp. Maybe this won’t be so bad.
With the steak rested and sitting on my cutting board, I angle my knife on a bias and slice off the first piece. It looks perfect. Thank god. I get two more slices done before I see the blood start pouring out of my left hand. Fuck. I had just gotten my knife sharpened, and the new efficiency surprised me. I cleaned up, hopped back on the line a couple minutes later, and got absolutely wrecked for the next four hours.
When I first started working in a kitchen, the thing that made me the most nervous was cooking proteins. It always blew me away that professional cooks could bang out fish or chicken or lamb at the right temperature in the right amount of time based purely on instinct. I assumed that with thousands of hours of repetition, I’d get there too. But as a self taught home cook, the thing that actually came to torment me was my knife, and everything they expected me to do with it.
A few weeks before that sauté disaster, I had a minor breakdown over a grapefruit. Our pastry chef had put a new cheesecake dish on the menu, which required daily grapefruit segments. She showed me how she wanted them done and I started taking on that task. I blew through grapefruit after grapefruit with imperfect slices — a little too much pith, uneven cuts on the ends, wasted fruit. I was pissed off at the repeated failures, and it was obvious. Another cook sidled over to me and put his hand on my shoulder.
“Bro, I think we’ve gotta go sharpen those knives.”
The thought had never occurred to me. Whenever I floundered through knife cut tasks, I assumed it was due to a lack of technical skill. If only I could concentrate harder and hold my knife in just the right way and replicate the motions from the other cooks just so, I’d get it right. The fluke would be beautifully thin. The radishes would be uniformly cubed. The steak would be trimmed just so. But that was false.
I think I got the misconception from cookbooks, which generally skip knife talk since it’s inaccessible and boring. Most cookbook authors will encourage you to have a sharp knife, and they’ll mention the importance of consistent cuts in certain dishes, but there’s very little how and why involved, which makes sense. For starters, it’s difficult to learn how to use your knife from pages in a book. And on top of that, space is precious and a majority of the audience simply wants to put a passable dish down on the table for their friends and family. Stopping to tell them when to use a steel sharpener and how to cube mirepoix is going to appeal to literally no one.
Here’s a little tour of knife references in the cookbooks I used the most when I was getting started:
Momofuku: In a recipe for octopus vinaigrette, David Chang writes, “When preparing the garlic and ginger for this recipe, make sure to take your time and work your knife skills: small, even pieces of garlic and ginger (not the mush that a garlic press or a ginger grater creates) really make a difference.” He also encourages slicing steak ¼-inch thick on a bias at a 15- to 30-angle to the cutting board.
Taste & Technique, in the headnotes for a horseradish gremolata: “Your knife skills really show here, so chop carefully and use a very sharp knife.”
Gabrielle Hamilton’s consistent chastising in Prune, such as, “Butcher ribeye to 14-16 ounces each. Don't shingle, saw, or hack. Use the appropriate tools for the different parts of the job. I often see you using a too-big knife for the finer work of trimming, and a too-small knife for the critical part of portioning.” Or, “Cut yellow watermelon straight across in large even wheels, at 1½ thick. Square (or rectangle) the wheels in 4 easy cuts, removing the rind completely and only leaving a plank of yellow fruit in front of you (save the rinds for garbage bin/dinner wax). Cut big, even, neat cubes. Remove any seeds. *Please show some knife skills. It drives me crazy to see this go to the table in uneven chunks.*”
Poole’s tuna tartare: “There are some fairly simple things required for making successful tuna tartare: super fresh fish, a good sharp blade, and a willingness to taste as you go. The texture of the dish is dependent on how the fish is cut, so take your time to create a uniform dice. I suggest slicing the tuna into ¼-inch-thick slabs, then placing them on a baking sheet in the freezer-not to freeze the tuna but to get it very, very cold, which makes it easier to dice. Make vertical slices, matching the thickness of each slab, and then horizontal slices of the same width. Consider the perfect dice demystified. Your knife game is now pro style.”
Three thing can happen when home cooks read these kinds of instructions:
Your eyes glaze over and you move on, desperate just to finish cooking in the next 30 minutes.
You say, “Oh, yeah, I know all of this stuff. I’ve read 100 cookbooks before with the same advice. I’ve got this.” And then you mangle you way through the knife work.
You make diligent attempts to follow the Poole’s style instructions exactly, but you knife is not sharp enough to accomplish the job.
I’ve been guilty of each. And all three are perfectly fine outcomes. There’s little overlap between the What To Cook When You Don't Feel Like Cooking crowd and the Rate My Chives sickos for a reason. Whatever gets people enthused in the kitchen is a net positive, and there’s not much about knife work that does the trick. But I think the extra steps and attention to detail are often worth it if you know where to start.
The first thing I tell friends who are trying to learn how to cook is to slow down. Treating recipes like a race against the clock is only going to make you too anxious to function. And to me the best way to ease up in the kitchen and learn how to trust your instincts is to start with your knife.
Whenever we had new cooks trail at the restaurant, we’d throw them knife cut tasks from the prep lists. Slicing red onions, cubing cured salmon, cutting chives, making lemon and lime wedges, that kind of thing. It was a way to assess their technique, but it was more importantly a way to see how they worked. Are they organized? Do they put in the same effort and care on the first cut as the last? Will they ask to see the technique, execute it, and then quickly move on to the next task?
That’s what I’ve come to love about knife work as I’ve cooked at home more in California over the past month. This isn’t showy, chefy nonsense. It’s not about getting ready for a Top Chef relay race. Going through the effort of keeping your knife sharp and your cuts clean is a fundamental step toward everything else about your cooking becoming dialed in.
Some more reasons to take your knife work a little more seriously
Literally everything gets easier with a sharp knife. And your hand hurts less from much intense gripping. You will be blown away the first time you slice through a piece of raw fish with a knife that has just been ground by a professional, engaging in a simple pull through the protein rather than pressing down.
Your food looks better and more appetizing.
Ingredients cooks more evenly and more consistently.
You’ll be cleaner and more organized.
You bruise herbs and dulls flavors when you pass through ingredients with your knife multiple times. Learning how to nail these cuts on first passes will elevate your final product.
It’s the base of building a habit to break you free from recipes. Rather than doing whatever a cookbook says — does anyone actually sit and measure ¼-inch cuts? — you’ll default to a better method of asking yourself, “Well, what’s the size of the thing I actually want to eat?” and cut towards that.
Like improving your tennis forehand, things will be slow at first. And more difficult than whatever hacky way you’ve been finagling. It might suck a little bit and be frustrating. But start off slow and get a little better at each cut each time.
Okay, so let’s say you’re in. You’ve bought into this all knives matter evangelism. Here’s a quick guide on how to get started:
Sharpening your knife
Cooking regularly means always been on the clock with your knife. First, take your best chef’s knife to get professionally sharpened. (You can do this at a specialty store or often at a local farmers’ market). Be careful when you get the knife back, and warn friends helping you in the kitchen before they borrow it. The difference will be stark, and the ease with which you can cut your hand will be significantly higher. Plan on doing this annually or bianually, depending on how often you cook.
From here, invest in a honing rod. This one from Korin is about $60. Using these properly can be a little tricky to learn, but I like this instructional video. The most important thing is keeping your knife on a consistent angel and sharpening both sides equally. Do this weekly.
(Don’t get your own whetstone unless you’re so Bear-pilled that you can’t help yourself. You’ll be better off just having a professional do the work when needed.)
Holding your knife
Let Jacques Pépin show you how to properly rest the knife against your knuckles and use the speed of your hand movements to guide the size of your cuts.
YouTube is going to be infinitely more helpful here than written instructions, but one inevitability of this space is that the video knife instruction market is overwhelmingly occupied by annoying men. Jacques is a reliable exception here. His book New Complete Techniques is also worth checking out.
Learning some knife cuts
Consider this an introductory list to begin mastering, with video demos. For each one, don’t worry about how long it takes you when you’re getting started. Just get a little more consistent each time. Once you feel good about the final product, take out your phone and start a timer. Don’t watch it while you cut. But the next time you do that task, see if you can knock it out a little more quickly.
My other big piece of advice here is to break down each ingredient into reasonable sizes before you start cutting. If you’re having a tough time holding or slicing something, just cut it in halves or quarters.
Dicing an onion
Cutting chives
Scallions on the bias
Grapefruit segments
Slicing a steak (the last couple minutes here, though the whole recipe is worthwhile)
Carving a whole chicken
Enjoy <3
This is so great! Do you have a recommendation for a solid chef knife or a set for someone who is a novice home cook?