The most labored work for cooking is the preparation and cutting procedures for vegetables and fruits. It must compliment the kind of cuisine, the cut of main ingredients and the extent of cooking process. But before we begin to identify the different techniques, we should make sure that the knife we are about to use will be sharp enough to cut the food.
Using a cutting board is more effective and clean, thus, we could use a damp cloth under the board to reduce the risk for slipping. Hold the knife tightly and comfortably to make sure that you will be able to cut the food depending on the needed cutting shape and size.
There are two categories for cutting method these are the precision cutting and the rough cutting. Both methods can affect the appeal of the food, the taste and the presentation when it is serve to the guests.
The precision method of cutting is a uniform way of slicing the ingredients such as julienne, brunoise, paysanne, macedoine and jardinière. Julienne is the famous way of slicing since it is very easy and simple. All you need to do is cut the ingredients into long and thin sticks that could look like a match.
While jardinière has the same process of julienne but shorter and thinner. Both are usual done to vegetables and used for garnishing with more or less 3 mm in thickness.
Brunoise and paysanne method starts with julienne style of slicing and place several cut vegetables and cut diagonally to make cube shaped ingredients. However, paysanne can make different shapes like square, round, triangle and cube, also used for vergetables.
Lastly, macedoine is used for fruits such as apple where you will wash, peel and core it and cut into 8 mm slices three times until you reached the desired cube-like shaped and used for fruit salads. Dicing is simplest technique (e.g. brunoise or macedoine) for cube shaped cutting of ingredients.
The rough cutting method includes the different coarse cutting of food used for the flavoring of food and not for service. Mirepoix is where you need to include equal number of ingredients such as carrots, celery and onions that is used for stocks and sauces or as bed for roasting meat. So that’s it, these are appealing way to cut the food for flavoring or for plate garnishing.
