The Tricks

 The Basics, Tips, and Ticks

Check back here, bookmark it, whatever you need to do. This page will probably get updated with more little tips that don't need a post all to themselves!

MISE EN PLACE:

KNIFE SKILLS:

DICING! :

SEPARATING AN EGG:

There are hundreds, I’d guess thousands, of cookery basics that the nations of the world have. The point of this blog is you probably have a basic idea about some of them, no one probably knows all of them anyway, but importantly; no one here is expected too (unless you already have a star or two, in which case, go teach someone new!).

Some of this may be ‘teaching mother to suck eggs’

(a description that works perfectly well here, but I have no blinking idea how it ever came to be!).

So if some of these basics are stuff you are already on top of, jump ahead! We’ll have recipes for some of the best go-to meals for every occasion, and things to keep in your back pocket but, first we need to be able to do all those things everyone else just seems to just... do…

As much as this isn’t the cooking or recipe part, if you’re hungry, and you just want to get to the making food bit; give this a look later, but I would always recommend understanding the tools of your kitchen before you start out

MISE EN PLACE:

The French have a term Mise En Place - everything in its place, or: your setup. Having read the recipe (twice), portion out your ingredients, place out your tea/table and serving spoons, find those rarely used herbs and bottles of sauce from the back of the cupboard. Put a heat proof mat down and make that space for the hot thing you’re going to have your hands full with later. Have everything in arms reach in whatever space you have, and your kitchen won’t feel quite so chaotic, you will be free to focus totally on your food (and it’s a lot easier to shove in the sink later!).

KNIFE SKILLS: (I'm no safety expert, these are simply things I've learnt the hard way, with cuts and scrapes, that I wish I'd known before I started messing around with whatever hand-me-down I found in shared flat kitchens.) My father drilled into me for DIY tools, but applies everywhere and has become a mantra when using any kitchen tools, and this applies to knives especially:

"Three fingers, One finger, Thumb"

I got so fed up with him keep saying it, that now it rings in my head every time I pick up a potentially dangerous tool. Feel free to bore anyone learning to cook to death with it!

• Hold the knife right where the handle meet the blade, so you have maximum control of the business end! Three fingers are wrapped around the handle, close to the blade - the heavy weighted part should sit against your wrist point, so the knife is weighted to pivot where you do. The Index Finger rests along the blade, pointing in the direction of the cut, you slice as if the knife is an extension of this finger-tip, pointing where you want to cut. The thumb opposes the fingers on the other side of the handle, pressed against the handle.
• The second lesson I learned (the hard way) is ALWAYS cut away from yourself! Yes it’s awkward, but if you slip and the knife is coming toward you, it’s going to be far more awkward!
• When cutting, let the weight of the knife do the cutting, (that's why you keep them sharp). Large chef's knives (see above) are weighted in the handle to slice thick root-vegetables, and keep the hand safely back away from the edge. If you have to apply more pressure, use the heel of your other hand on he back of the blade, gripping with your fingertips tucked in where your palm meets the metal, well clear of the edge and even then apply your body weight over the cut, so the effort is directed down, not across (which pushes everything around)
• To chop finely (dice) with a chef’s knife, use the heel of your secondary hand on the back of the blade, right where the tip meets the chopping board. Fingers spread and hand flat, so nothing is near the sharp edge. Use this hand and a little pressure to make the tip into a pivot point of a lever, then you can use the back of the blade and the weight of the handle to chop down, rotating around the tip to dice the food evenly.
  Don’t worry about going quickly! Go carefully, and you’ll naturally speed up like they do on the teley as you get more used to it.

In a reverse of what you might think is safe; always keep your chef's knives (and by these I mean the 10cm+ long serious butchery knives and choppers) razor sharp… Believe it or not a blunt knife can do more harm than a sharp one as it can fail to cut and skip unexpectedly. It doesn’t sound sensible, but trust me it is always worth taking good care of your knives. Used properly, and maintained well, they will do you far less risk than sawing at something with a small, blunt, paring-knife where you have to use lots of pressure and effort to do the work of one clean cut. You can pick up a basic hand-held kitchen knife and scissors sharpener from dozens of online retailers or your favorite high-street catering shop. One of these days I'll have an affiliate link to plug, but in the meantime if you get stuck ask in the comments and I'll link to mine. Now we have the tools, and the bits no one told us, it’s time to actually pick up some food, and start with the first thing someone who doesn’t think they can cook will start with: “I can’t even...”

DICING ONIONS/VEG TV Chefs, even the amateur contestants, break out a freshly peeled onion, sans roots and all, and in a rapid fire sequence of finger-risking chops, render it a pile of finely diced chunks How do you do that without risking your digits, and is everyone supposed to go at it like a food processor?

No, to the later question, and there is a great trick to the former which will have you dicing onions and prepping that Mirepoix in no time!

• Peel the skin and any browning layers off your onion 

• (If this is a red onion you’ll want to take it back to the first softer and shinier layer, discarding any thin membrane layers in between)

• Holding you onion in your off-hand, thumb on one half, fingers on the other, knife on the centerline of your onion - slice through the whole onion from root-to-knot, cutting both in half, and leaving half of both the root and the knot at the top and bottom of both halves - This is the key trick that will keep the structure of the onion together while you dice instead of the layers falling apart!

• Slice from about 1cm short of the root/knot back long the whole length of the half. The root/knot will hold the slices together, but it doesn’t hurt to lightly pinch it all together as you come to the edge.

TIP: turn your fingernails toward the blade to protect your fingertips, if the blade skips, it’ll hit the hard protective nail (of course it helps if you don’t bite your nails like me… oops!)

• Turn the onion 90o so the root/knot is now closest to you and cut across the whole onion, cutting across the slices you already made (held together by the root you left on)
• The Layers of the onions have done a huge chunk of the slicing for you

• Slice across the cuts you already made, cutting back toward the root/knot, which -handily- you can hold (and then throw away)

• This will give you 0.5-1cm square chunks of eye-watering root vegetables. 

Go at your own speed (you’ll find you get into your own rhythm with a little practice and there’s no point paying £’s more for a bag of pre-chopped onions).

By keeping the root/knot attached and working with the layers of the onion it keeps its shape right up to the point where it’s ready to fall into a finely diced pile. Of course you’ll need a sharp knife for this, see above

SEPARATING AN EGG:

Looks clever as heck when the chefs do it, not nearly as hard as it looks with a little care.

• Take a free-range hens egg* and a small bow - one with thin edges work better* (this trick presumably works with any eggs, but I’ve only tried it with chicken eggs. Also, free-range, because be nice to the chucks!)
• With the larger part of the egg (bottom) in your preferred hand palm, tap the side of the egg on the edge of the bowl, firmly enough to make a crack about ⅓ of the way through the egg. 
• Take the two soon-to-be halves of the egg in the fingertips of each hand, gently! 
• Press your two thumbs into the crack, and pull the egg apart, using the opposite side of the egg (where the rest of your fingers meet) as a hinge point, so that both halves end up in your hands with the open side facing up (see picture)
• Allow the yolk to fall into the largest part of the shell, most of the egg-white will now fall away into the bowl (yes, you’re fingers are going to get a bit messy, remember to wash them straight after before touching anything else)

• Tipping both halves of the shell toward each other, allow the yolk to slip into the small half of the shell, being careful not to break the yolk, letting the rest of the white to fall away into the bowl

• Repeating the step above, transfer the yolk back and forward between the two halves of the shell, until all of the white has fallen into the bowl. 

If there is a thicker part of the white that doesn’t want to separate, use the half of the shell that doesn’t currently have the yolk in it :

Carefully use the edge of the empty shell-half to ‘cut’ the white from the yolk - scraping it against the shell that has the yolk in it where the stubborn white part hangs down between the halves

Save the egg whites, I’ve got a great cheat’s recipe for a fast Frittata coming!