Knife Skills

Now that you’re equipped to use a knife safely, here is how to do the basic skills, such as chopping, dicing, slicing, shredding and julienning. Recipes usually indicate what technique is required for preparation.  

Chopping
Chopping is the method of cutting food into pieces. In this method they do not need to be uniform, small or the same size.  Chopping is usually referred to as the less precise and chunkier version of dicing.  If a recipe required food chopped small it will indicate this in the method or ingredients list.

Slicing
Slicing is the method of cutting fine and uniform cross sections in food.  Food can be sliced straight up and down or diagonally. 

Dicing
Dicing is the method of cutting food into small cube shaped pieces.  Sizes vary between 0.5 – 1.5 centimetres square.  For example, onions require a fine dice for sauteing or putting in sauce and potatoes require a medium to large dice for creating diced potato.

Julienning 
This is the method of cutting food into narrow, fine sticks.  This method requires uniform pieces, so precise cutting is necessary.

Shredding
This involve cutting an item of food into long, fine slices.  This is great for lettuce and leafy green vegetable.


Click here to go on to Putting These Skills into Practice.