Knife Skills Class 🔪🧅🥕

Slicing, Dicing, and Flower Making (Safely)

I love to cook, and many of my 50 Things activities seem to have something to do with food (preparing, trying, or experimenting) so learning to use the tools in my kitchen better was something I had wanted to do for a long time. I signed up for a 3-hour knife class at a local cooking school, and now I am much more confident in my abilities to slice and dice at amazing speed (although, what is amazing speed to me is likely not considered “amazing” by professional chefs:)

In this class, we also learned to create vegetable roses (something I probably won’t be trying regularly) and to cut a whole chicken into parts. The chicken butchering is definitely more useful, but I am mostly pescatarian, so I also don’t plan to use that skill frequently either.

In my “day job", I work to help keep people safe at work and hand injuries and cuts are something I am all too familiar with, so the safety lessons I learned in this class are lessons I think everyone should know. Three of the most important include:

• Tuck fingertips and thumb in like a claw (see this video I found on YouTube that will demonstrate this better than I ever could). I’ve had to help a panicked neighbor and also a family member when this rule was not followed (and it wasn’t pretty).

• Always cut away from the body. If there is a slip, you are less likely to stab or cut your body.

• Keep knives sharp. This one seems counterintuitive, but sharp knives are safer because less downward force is required, and they are less likely to slip and cause an injury. If a cut occurs, the cut will have clean edges and will heal more quickly.

If you don’t know how to sharpen your knives, that could be another item on your 50 Things list!

Luckily, I am able to practice these skills almost every day, which helps me to improve all the time. The 3-hour knife skills class was some of the most valuable time I have spent learning something new. In fact, an advanced knife skills may be next.

Boxmaking (related because it also included some knife work)

Knife Cuts 101 on YouTube

Six Ways to Cut an Onion on YouTube

Knife Skills You Need to Master on YouTube

Try to slice a carrot and an onion into pieces the same size. For example, all 1/4” cubes or all 1/2” strips.

P.S. - I’d love to know where the subscribers of 50 Things are located. Can you reply with just the name of your state (or, if you are outside of the U.S., your country)? Thanks!