You wouldn’t send a soldier into war without teaching them how to wield their weapon. Similarly, you wouldn’t send a chef into the kitchen without proper knife skills. Once you’ve mastered the basics of chopping and dicing, there’s a whole new world that awaits you with advanced skills that enable you to create anything that crosses your mind.
Chiffonade
The first one worth knowing is the chiffonade cut, which in French translates to think ribbons. It’s a cut that comes in handy on most days and especially for finely cutting herbs and leafy greens. The final product is delicate and elegant, so this is ideal for preparing garnishes as well.
Stack up the leaves aligning them as closely as possible before rolling the whole stack into a thin cigar shape. Start at one end and make clean thin cuts lengthwise across the stack which when unrolled should give you a handful of beautiful chiffonade ribbons.
Batonnet
This is another kitchen staple it serves as a launchpad for many other cuts such as dicing, julienning and brunoise, but it is also one of the most frequently used on a day-to-day basis.
Start by cutting off both ends of the ingredient and square it into a rectangle. Next, cut the ingredient into slabs of about a quarter inch thickness, before slicing these into strips to create your batons. The aim of an ideal Batonnet is a finished product that measures ½ inch × ½ inch × 2½ - 3 inches.
Julienne
One step smaller than the allumette cut or matchstick cut, and the next stage up from a batonnett and is especially useful for creating salad or adding to sauces. Vegetables of this size tend to cook quickly as well.
Begin by cutting your ingredient into small segments (about two inches long) and cutting off a small part to create a flat base. Place the ingredient face down on this flat edge and make small, equal slices, which you’ll then stack up on top of each other and slice down again, to create matchsticks around 2 to 3 inches long and 1/16 - to ⅛ inches thick.
It’s basically the same process as batonneting, although you’ll just chop your pieces once more to make them into matchstick shapes.
Brunoise
The brunoise knife cut is the tiniest of all and the smallest version of the dice cuts. Due to its tiny size, it’s most often used in garnishes.
You’ll start off by julienning the veg, by cutting a flat surface on each side and turning it into a rectangle and cutting lengthwise slices of about an eighth of an inch.
You then need to stack these slices on top of one another and slice them into eight inches once again, before finally turning the stick 90 degrees and repeating one last time to create your beautiful tiny squares approximately ⅛ inch × ⅛ inch × ⅛ inch in size.