Genius Hour 1.3

Different cutting techniques is what I worked on and learned this week. The techniques that I tried are called julienne, slicing, large dice, and batonnet. I knew all of these techniques, except for batonnet, that one was a new one I learned. All these techniques I knew of, but I had not tried all of them before.

The first one I tried was julienne, it is when you make long thin strips while cutting. I decided to use this technique on a carrot. First, I cut the carrot into long, wide strips, then you cut those into thin strips. I struggled a little with this one, because my knife wasn't quite sharp enough to cut the carrot into as thin of strips as I wanted.

This is what the julienne cuts came out looking as.

The batonnet cut was the one I had tried next. I had never heard of this technique before, but I had cut things like this before. For this cut you are supposed to square off your item, which I used a carrot, and make rectangular sticks. Squaring off your item means making each side flat, so you have a stable surface to cut it on so it doesn’t fly away. During this cut I forgot to square off two of the sides, so as you can see in the picture below, two of the sides are not flat.

These are what my batonnet cuts came out looking like.

Dicing was next, there are many different dices. You can have small dice cuts which are tiny, almost like julienne cuts but also slicing that into smaller pieces. The cuts I made are probably about a medium dice, and I used cheese to practice this technique. This cut got a little difficult when I would get to the end of the block, because the pieces would start to get uneven.

These are the large dice cuts, they are supposed to come out looking like cubes.

The last technique that I did was slicing. For this technique, I decided to slice a cucumber. This technique was probably the easiest. I took the vegetable and cut the ends off, and then all you have to do is just slice it and try to make the slices as even as possible.

Here are my slices of cucumber.

The importance of these techniques is to make slices and cuts the same size. You want whatever cuts your making the same size, because if you cook them, you want them to cook evenly. They will not cook evenly if they are not the same size. Next week I think I will try to attempt cooking a couple different potato recipes.