My name is Adam and I am not a chef. I am a person who cooks. I cook food for myself
and my family here in our house.
Cooking for a living, at least in a certain context, has become a much higher-status occupation
in recent years, and I think that's good in many ways. It's good when people who do laborious
creative work are recognized as the gifted artisans that they are, and it's good when
they're paid as such, so thumbs up to that.
But the flip-side is that now this thing that you and I and most normal people do as a basic
component of domestic life has become not just a job but a profession — and the card-carrying
members of that guild often look upon us just cooking in our homes as though we are kinda
practicing without a license.
Nowhere is this toxic dynamic more evident than in the notion that all of us who cook
must have "knife skills." Certain ways of handling a knife are among the first things
that a person learns in culinary school and/or the restaurant trade, and as a result, these
techniques have become the shibboleth that trained chefs use to distinguish their exulted
class from the rest of us.
Every group of self-important people has something like this. In the journalism world that I
came from, those of us who've paid our dues working at legacy news outlets recognize our
fellow club members with obscure and mostly inconsequential points of style — like using
an Associated Press-style abbreviation for a U.S. state as opposed to the postal abbreviation
for that state, which is what most normies do. You use a postal abbreviation, and we
know that you're not a member of the club. How dare you try to gather and disseminate
timely information of relevance to an audience (AKA report the news)? You're not in our priesthood!
You're not even wearing the special robes!
That's actually an unfair comparison, because "knife skills" actually have a practical function
in the professional kitchen. They're not purely symbolic or ceremonial. What I would challenge
is the notion that what is good for the professional kitchen is necessarily good for the home kitchen.
That's as absurd as saying what's good for a professional bodybuilder is good for a guy
who's just trying to stay reasonably fit. Hi, Jay. Love you, miss you.
Let me try to prove this to you with math. I think when most people people talk about
"knife skills," they're really talking about one specific technique known as "the claw."
Most mere mortals stabilize the food with the pads of the fingers on their non-cutting
hand. In culinary school, they teach you to tuck your fingertips up so that the worst
you could do is shave a little skin off of your knuckles. It'd be really hard to cut
into your fingertips doing this.
At least that's the theory. In practice, does using the claw technique actually prevent
injury? I don't know. I haven't been able to find any kind of scientific research on
the subject. Certainly, professional cooks say that it does, and I'm willing to accept
the validity of their "lived experience," as the kids say these days — as though there's
any other kind of experience.
But I don't think that it necessarily follows that the claw is right for all of us. The
claw is awkward. It always makes me feel like my hand is gonna cramp up. The claw takes
practice. It feels very unstable to me, especially when I get down to the end of whatever I'm
cutting.
I have no doubt that I could master this technique if I put in the time and energy, but I simply
see no reason to, when there is a simpler, and much more natural, and I suspect just
as effective technique of keeping my fingertips safe, which I will call the "walk, don't run"
technique.
When you walk, your weight is always on the ground, distributed across your whole foot.
When you run, you actually leave the ground with every step, you generally kinda bounce
off the ground from your forefoot.
The claw is great for what I would call doing a "running chop," when the knife is almost
kinda bouncing off of the cutting board and it never stops moving up and down. It's like
a piston.
If you watch my cooking videos, you could be forgiven for believing that I cut with
a running chop. But watch when I play this footage back at the original speed. See? I'm
walking, not running. The knife stops moving at the bottom of every chop. I bring it back
up again, re-set, and cut. That is "walk, don't run" cut.
Now, I like to use fast-motion shots in cooking videos for two reasons: 1) I like to show
you every single action that is necessary to prepare a meal. I hate cooking shows where
some prepared ingredients come out of nowhere. Like this Marco Pierre White fish stew video:
"Chunky fish stew, Mediterranean-style. Very easy, very simple, very quick — 10-15 minutes.
[...] This is a one-pan dish."
All sounds reasonable until he's finished the dish and then he scatters on some perfectly
julienned vegetables — where did those come from? And did you include the work of cutting
those in your 10-15 minute time estimate? Oh and they're blanched, too. That means they
were boiled in water for a minute and then usually shocked in an ice-water bath — he
needed a pot to do that, so it's not really a one-pot dish, now is it, Marco?
I think that kind of cooking show gives you an unrealistic notion of how much time and
work you're signing up for. I don't think you want to watch me cooking in real time,
so I use fast-motion to quickly show you every single thing you'll need to do if you want
to make what I'm making.
The other reason I use fast-motion is that I think it's incredibly satisfying to watch
something, anything being made very very fast. But I feel bad that, in the process, I might
have given a lot of people the impression that they too need to be mowing through things
the way that Marco does. Hell, even Marco says...
"You don't have to turn them into matchsticks, like I do. I'm quite confident with a knife,
so it's easy for me. But if your knife skills aren't that great, just chop."
Just chop. Just chop your food into smaller pieces however you can — however feels comfortable
and safe to you. I think the key is just to take it slow. I mean, when you're taking a
blade to your body, do you feel compelled to blast through the job like you've got a
hundred other guys waiting in barber chairs for their shave? No, you take it slow, because
a sharp razor is a thing to be respected, like one from Harry's, the sponsor of this
video.
I've been shaving with Harry's for years because most other razor brands are kinda cheesy and
stupid-expensive. Harry's founders Jeff and Andy were also sick of over-paying for over-designed
razors, so they bought their razor factory in Germany and now you can get these scary-sharp
blades for only $2 a refill, delivered straight to your door.
This is the new travel kit that Harry's sent me. This will replace my standard travel toiletry
kit consisting of a plastic bag — I'm so classy. You get travel-size shave gel, post-shave
balm, body wash — all in quantities that are small enough for airport security. I always
like the scents of Harry's products — they strike me as adult, and not trashy. You also
get this typically gorgeous Harry's weighted handle.
You can get $5 off your Harry's kit at harry's.com/adamr. You'll be doing us both a favor. That link
is in the description. $5 off. Thank you, Harry's.
As I said, when wielding a blade, I think working slow will keep you out of most trouble,
and here's another analogy from the exercise world: The deadlift — that most gloriously
troglodytic exercise of lifting something very heavy off the ground and putting it back
down again.
The "dead" in deadlift means you're supposed to start each repetition of the lift from
a dead stop. The weight is entirely on the floor, no longer supported at all by your
body at the bottom of each rep. That's as opposed to kinda bouncing it off the floor
like this — you're never really fully putting it down here.
There are many reasons to start the deadlift from a dead stop, but one of them is to re-set
your form. You get your chest out and your back straight and rigid before every single
pull. If you don't don't do this, you start to look like Drake — his back is all rounded
and he's exposing himself to the possibility of grievous spinal injury, which is why everyone
made fun of him for this.
Just like a deadlift, I re-set my form every chop when I'm cutting food. If I became distracted,
if a child suddenly came barreling into the kitchen or something, I don't think I would
slip and cut myself, because I'm reestablishing my concentration on every single stroke. Nothing
is on auto-pilot here. If I got distracted, I would just naturally stop.
There is, of course, a reason that professional chefs tend to use the claw and a running chop
instead of doing what I do: What I do is super-slow. But I only have one onion to cut up. They
have to get through a 50 lb bag of onions.
And here comes the math part. This half of an onion I chopped in 35 seconds — that's
by walking. This half I chopped up in 15 seconds by running. That means that I can save myself
a grand-total of 40 seconds on my day by using a running chop on the whole onion that I need
for my dinner. Big deal.
But if I were chopping a hundred onions for a restaurant, 40 seconds an onion adds up
to more than an hour saved. That actually is a big deal. Professionals need to cut quick.
I don't, and you probably don't either.
It's rather like driving. I drive like a grandpa and I am proud of it, because I understand
math. A whole bunch of people in my neighborhood make the same basic 8-mile drive as I do every
morning when I take my kid to school. It takes me about 20 minutes, which means I'm averaging
24 miles per hour, which is not bad for city traffic.
And I see all these a-holes around me doing psycho demolition-derby Olympics just so that
they can can get to the red light and start waiting a few seconds before I do, and for
what? Let's say, very generously, that their average city traffic speed is 30 miles per
hour, instead of my 24. They've saved a whopping four minutes on their drive. Wow, whatever
will you do with all of your spare time? That's assuming that you made it there alive — you
didn't crash and die.
In contrast, if you're a long-haul trucker doing a thousand-mile route, pushing your
average highway speed from say, 60 to 70 is gonna save you more than two hours. And that
actually matters.
It's all about scale, people. If you're doing anything remotely hazardous at a modest scale,
just do it slowly. There's no point in doing it fast.
Now, you might be wondering, "Well, Adam, do you have any evidence to back up the notion
that cutting slowly with your fingers out is just as safe as cutting fast with your
fingers in?" No, I don't have any evidence, but neither do you.
I have scoured the scientific literature for any quantitative research on accidental injuries
involving kitchen knives, and there's basically nothing. There's lots of research about intentional
knife injuries — stabbings, suicides — that makes sense to me. There's lots of research
about repetitive stress injuries involving knives — that's of great relevance to the
meatpacking industry, so that makes sense to me.
But what I would think is a basic area of home and occupational safety is strangely
under-researched. We don't know what kinds of cutting in the kitchen tend to make people
hurt themselves.
The best I can do is give you some sense of what kinds of foods tend to be associated
with knife injuries in the kitchen. Here in the U.S. we have something called the National
Electronic Injury Surveillance System. It's a public database online where you can see
anonymized records of hospital emergency department visits filtered by what kind of consumer product
may have been involved. So here's what I downloaded — every single ER visit in the States from
2018 involving product code 0464 — that's "cutlery; knives," — about 7,000 incidents
from 2018, the most recent year available. Each of these has what they call a "narrative"
attached to it — "33-year-old male was cutting limes with a knife and cut left thumb." Or,
"56-year-old female states she was making dinner when she became angry..." You know
what you did!
I did a little analysis of these narratives and came up with this visualization — it's
linked in the description. This shows the number of times that specific foods are mentioned
in these narratives about knife injuries. Most often mentioned is the generic "vegetables"
or "veggies." Right under that is avocado — 151 mentions of avocados in these ER narratives.
There actually are a couple studies about avocado cutting injuries specifically, because
there really has been a sudden epidemic of such injuries accompanying the sudden popularity
of the avocado here in the States. After avocado, we have the generic "meat," followed by potato,
onion, chicken, apple, melon. I notice a little pattern here — lots of round, hard things.
Look how high lemons and limes are on this list.
From this data, I would guess — and this is just a guess, this is not definitive, this
is not scientific, this is my guess — I would guess that what this tells us is that
cutting round things is one of the most dangerous things that we can do — things that can
roll. Therefore hopefully we can protect ourselves by making round things flat before we do anything
else to them, which is a standard technique of "knife skills."
But again, that's just a guess, and it's one that the scientist I consulted on this cautioned
me against making too hastily. Thanks, by the way, to Dr. Wendy Shields at the Johns
Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy who checked my work on all this.
If you're a public health researcher or graduate student, I think there's a great opportunity
to do some needed work in this area. But in the meantime, with nothing but my own common
sense to go by, I will continue to do a nice, slow, walking chop with my fingertips straight
out, because that helps me hold the food more stably.
You do you — get your food into smaller pieces however feels right to you. Just don't
let a some chef bully you into thinking you're not a real cook because you can't go ptptptptptptptptptptptptpt.
Speed kills. Arrive alive.