[Intro music]
Batonnet are the most common
culinary knife cuts.
Literally translated, batonnet means
little sticks in French.
Sticks are long, regularly shaped
with perfectly square ends.
There are five stick sizes with each
its own name: pont-neuf, frite, batonnet,
allumette, and julienne.
Why should you care?
First of all for the look.
All the vegetables will look great in
the plate and it will be regular.
And during the cooking process
everything will cook evenly. No headaches.
Among the batonnet series,
pont-neuf is the largest one.
And it only applies to potatoes.
So before cutting your potatoes,
make sure they are long enough.
You want to have your potatoes
7 centimeters long or about 2 inch and a half.
So at the market buy the longest potatoes.
Peel your potatoes first and keep them in
cold water in order to make sure they
do not turn brown. Okay.
Then dry your potatoes that way your knife
won't be slippery on the starch.
And let's trim them.
To trim is the action to, we call it in French parer,
to really prepare the potato or the vegetable
into a box shape. Let's have a look.
Cut the end off. Then make a first cut.
Then rest the potato on that flat surface like this.
Trim again. And keep turning the potato.
Pomme pont-neuf should be
2 centimeters square by 7 centimeter long.
Okay. So then I know I can trim it here.
Remove the ruler and cut. Measure the length.
7 centimeter, so right there.
You won't need to measure all your potatoes,
you just make one then you will use it
as a template for the others.
So here I can cut two pomme pont-neuf, right.
So cut it at 4. Good. So trim. And again in half.
Perfect, 2 centimeters by 7 centimeters.
Pomme pont-neuf.
Obviously when you will make pomme pont-neuf
or those vegetable cuts,
you will have a lot of trimmings.
For potatoes keep them in cold water
and use the trimmings to make your favorite
mashed potato or even roasted
garlic potato cream soup.
Batons or you may call it frite
if it is made with potato, also called french fries,
are the next cut.
They are 1 cm square by 6 to 7
centimeters long, preferably 7 centimeters.
Take the squared off potato,
measure about a centimeter.
So here I can do two.
Then cut again 1 centimeter pieces.
And use that part as a sample for the next one.
After making baton or pomme frite,
let's make batonnet.
So I'm going to use the trimmings
that I had earlier.
So I want my cut to be about 6 millimeters
and the length should be 5 or 7 centimeters.
It doesn't matter.
Place your cut side flat down
and cut it into little batonnet. [cutting sounds]
discard the trimmings.
Batonnet.
Our next stick cut is pomme allumette
or matchstick, which is half of the
size of the batonnet.
Cut your box into 3 millimeter slices.
Cut each slices into 3 millimeters sticks
or allumette. [cutting sounds]
Then put your allumettes together.
And trim them to make them perfect.
And voila.
Julienne should be 1.5 or 1 to 2
millimeters squares.
This is where having sharp knife
is very important. [cutting sounds]
Julienne. Let's do a recap.
Pont-neuf, baton or frite, batonnet,
allumette, julienne.
Now that you know how to make sticks
you are a step ahead to cut cubes.
This is what we are going to learn now.