Gordon Ramsay's Tip For For Honing Your Vegetable Cutting Skills
Vegetables are an essential part of any healthy diet, colorful plate, and flavorful meal. They can be incredibly versatile if you know what you're doing. It's most definitely worth your time to get acquainted with how to prep them and maximize their versatility.
Of course, learning how to cut and chop vegetables is a very obvious part of prep, but mastering the techniques is quite difficult and requires a great deal of skill and practice. Depending on the dish or dishes you are prepping vegetables for, you must consider which parts of the vegetables need to be cut, how to separate the parts that you want from the ones that you don't, and which technique you will use to shape the vegetable so it compliments your dish best. Even after you've figured all of this out, you still need to do the actual chopping. It can be overwhelming, but with a helpful tip from Chef Gordon Ramsay, some planning, and a whole lot of practice you can learn to maximize your vegetables both for taste and for presentation.
Tip of the knife
Chef Gordon Ramsay suggests that you begin with softer vegetables like zucchini and as you begin to feel more comfortable (or you just get tired of cutting zucchini), move on to harder vegetables like carrots or butternut squash, per Masterclass. Every vegetable is different and the prep can vary (for instance prepping a carrot will be different than prepping a tomato) depending on both the vegetable and how it will be used in the dish, but there is some structured categorization to knife work techniques.
Chef Ramsay suggests learning classic French vegetable knife cuts as they cover a wide range of shapes, techniques, and are a decently comprehensive look at culinary prep for most highly used vegetables. According to Crush, the kinds of cuts and variations range from julienne (which requires cutting vegetables into little strips or sticks), to carré (a large dice into cubes), to the rounder, circular cuts of rondelle. Working these skills will help your dishes go from good to great. Plus you'll have a whole bunch of already-prepped zucchini and learn just enough French to impress your friends with both a sharp knife and a sharp tongue.