Hello. My name is Adam Ragusea. I am not a chef. I am a guy in his kitchen with a camera.
And as such, I do not wield my knife like a trained chef. I use it like a normal person,
because I am. And I'm now going to show you the normal person strategies I've used through the
years to convert my foods into multiple smaller foods without cutting myself. I can't remember
the last time I cut myself in the kitchen. I burn myself all the time, but I never cut myself. Hey,
is that the new Adam Ragusea custom chef knife available for purchase at adamragusea.com?
Maybe. We'll start with an onion. Nearly every savory recipe on earth starts with peel and
chop and onion. How exactly does one do that? Step one is get off the papery skin. If you want
to make whole slices of onion, you have to make a very shallow cut across the outer layer and then
peel. But if you're going to chop the onion, you might as well just cut it in half to begin with.
Now, it's way easier to reach under any undesirable outer layers and peel them off.
You still have this inedible bit of stem at the top to slice off. I swear, if someone comments,
oh, that's not a stem, it's a tunic or a scape or whatever. I will think of a snappy reply to you,
and then I will never post it. You've been warned. At this point I like to stop and clear away all
of the inedible bits before I actually start chopping, with the exception of the root end.
You have to leave that because it holds all the layers together as you're cutting through them.
First thing I'm going to show you is I think a more traditional way of chopping an onion. I do
it sometimes. Just slice straight down from the top, almost all the way to the bottom,
but not quite. Again, you want to leave that base intact so that all the concentric layers are held
in place for you while you work. Slice straight down to the board, that's the traditional part.
Nice and slow, nice and careful, as far as you can go. At this stage,
I have seen classically trained chefs make some cuts through the onion this way. I just don't
think it's really worth the trouble. Just cross cut the slices and your pieces fall away.
Now, time out. Grip. Most of the time I favor the pinch grip, which is very common, very popular,
very natural. I suppose the most natural thing to do would be just hold it by the handle like
a sword, that's what the handle is there for. But I think most people find that with a chef knife
and not a sword, you get a lot more control if you actually grab the blade of the knife
a little bit. So you take your two fingers here and you grip them around the knife here and then
your middle finger hangs out right behind the heel right there, and the rest of your hand is on the
handle. That's the pinch grip or a basic variation of the pinch grip, works really good for me.
It's frowned upon, but sometimes I do find myself using the pointer grip where the
finger comes out on the spine of the knife there, the first finger there,
I find that I do this naturally when I need to have a little bit of extra control over the tip.
That's for a very specialized situations, I almost never do this. Generally I'm back here,
it's a good grip. And note how the knife moves forward as it simultaneously moves down,
knives generally work a lot better when they move across two axes at once,
slice forward and chop down at the same time. That's particularly good for onions because
it's gentle and doesn't spray as much onion gas up into your face. Cutting in two directions at
once might require me to move a little slower, but that's just fine. I am not a professional. I don't
have to mow through a whole bag of onions. I only have to do one, so slow is fine. Discard that root
and there we are, totally good enough. However, it is, of course, not optimal to
use square, grid like cuts to cut something that is not a cube, but is rather a sphere,
a set of concentric spheres. You're just going to get a really uneven assortment of shapes when
you put a round thing through a square cutter, which is essentially what we've just done. And
I don't think that really matters for a home cook, but let's pretend for a second that it does.
This now is the onion chopping technique that I have used for decades at this point. It's
just what I do naturally. And it would be totally impractical and indeed dangerous for somebody who
had to work really fast for a professional who has to go through a bunch of onions. I don't have to
do that. I can go slow. And this is what I do. Slice from the top, almost down to the bottom at
an angle instead of straight down, repeat and just orbit around the natural curvature of the onion.
That part isn't unconventional. Lots of people do this, but usually with only one
quarter of an onion at a time, because a problem arises when your orbit takes you to the other
hemisphere over here and now to keep making these cuts, I have to start cutting away from my body
and indeed toward my hand. Again, this would be stupid, dangerous if I were going fast, but I'm
not. And I think I've got it under control, just because you can't do a U-turn at a hundred miles
per hour, doesn't mean you should never do a U-turn. Just slow down. It'll be fine.
And if you wanted little half moon bits of onion, you could at this point, just slice off the root
end and they would fall apart into these perfect little "frenched" onions, they're called, but
I'm going to go for a chop or a dice or whatever anybody calls pieces of these general dimensions
and there, check how much more uniform those pieces are. Not that I think it really matters,
but this is just something I do. So I'm showing it to you. That's how I cut onions. Now, yes,
I am the guy who made a video called, you don't need knife skills. But if you watch that video,
you know that I was talking about something very specific, one particular technique that
is the foundation of what professional chefs generally call knife skills.
And that is the claw grip. If you want an expert demonstration of the clog grip, watch somebody
else, because I don't use it. But the basic idea is you put the tips of your fingers on the food.
And then the side of the knife actually makes contact with your knuckles as you cut.
This stabilizes the knife and pushes the cutting edge away from your fingertips. If
you do it right, it's virtually impossible to cut yourself. I'm sure the claw grip is essential for
professionals who need to do what I would call a running chop, where the knife never stops moving,
chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop. When
you're a professional, you need to realize some economies of scale.
If you can shave 35 seconds off of an operation that you do a hundred times a night, that's
an hour that you have just saved on your shift. That's a big deal, but when I'm just doing that
operation once or twice a night here in my home, there's no economy of scale for me to realize by
going that fast and thus, I just don't think this is necessary for me. I simply don't need to put in
the time it takes to master this very safe, very effective, but very unnatural and awkward maneuver
known as the claw grip. The human hand is not evolved to hold stuff down like that.
It's evolved to do this, press down flat with the big pads of the fingers instead of the little
fingertips. Yes, my fingertips are out in the open in a place where I could slice through them,
which is why my knife is way far away from my fingers, way far away from my stabilizing hand.
And as the food gets shorter and shorter and I gradually have to get closer to my stabilizing
fingers, I just slow way down. It's a walking chop, not a running chop. I'm resetting the
knife carefully for every single cut. I only have one bunch of spring onions to slice today,
so it's fine if it takes me an extra 30 seconds. I'm not a professional cook, nor do I need to try
to imitate a professional cook to make you think that I'm a badass. I am a badass at other things
in life. I don't need to be a badass at this. That said, there are some cutting jobs here in the home
kitchen that do legit scare me and where I think some more considered and deliberate technique is
warranted. An example would be the cutting of hard round things like carrots, hard things are
inherently more dangerous because they require more force and round things are more dangerous
because they roll. If you push hard, and then the carrot rolls out from under you, your knife could
go flying in Lord knows what direction. So while I'm not a fan of the claw grip,
I am a fan of what you could call the clamp grip when cutting hard round things. I clamp my hand
above and around the knife, pinch the carrot super tight, super stable, and then cut through. Now the
pieces are flat, and flat things are more stable and safe to cut. If you have a round thing to cut,
get it flat as soon as you can. Just cut those in half. And now I can crosscut some nice quarter
slices. It's a very safe, very easy way to break down a carrot. Say you want a diced or brunoise
carrot, here I think is the easiest and safest way for a person with normal human skills to
approximate a brunoise. Here's how I do it. Clamp the carrot and then cut it in half as before, lay
it on its nice stable flat side and just make thin slices long ways. I have to get my fingers very
close to the blade toward the end there, which is why I'm just going very slow, walk don't run.
Then I'll go back and very and precisely cut the wider pieces into more narrow matchsticks or
Julienne. The culinary school types have far more precise ways of doing this, that get them perfect
tiny squares. For me I don't think it's worth the effort or the waste. If I crosscut those, I think
that's good enough, but time out, notice how, when it was time to rotate the cutting angle, I rotated
the food rather than rotating myself. See, I moved the food instead of contorting my body
into an unnatural position to change the cutting angle. That is good. I think it's the right thing
to do. Move the food around you. I mentioned this because I've noticed that in my recipe videos, I
sometimes cut things at a somewhat unnatural and uncomfortable and probably not the safest
angle. And why do I do that? Well, because I'm not just cooking in here, I'm making videos.
So I have other things I have to worry about. I have to worry about lines of sight,
like am I getting my hand or the knife in the way of what the camera is seeing? Am I blocking light?
Am I creating a shadow that's making it hard for you to see what you need to see? Oh, I am, well,
I guess I can reach [inaudible 00:09:16] my camera angle, but oh no, my kid is in the background of
the shot picking his nose at the kitchen table. So I just have more things to worry about. And
sometimes I just say, screw it. And I just move my body rather than resetting the whole shot
because that's going to solve the problem for me from a shooting perspective. But I'm probably not
modeling really good practices for you. And so I'm going to try to stop doing that.
Anyway, soup, I guess I'm making a big pot of vegetable soup today. I really had no other
choice. I think another particularly hazardous job in the kitchen is to cut things with smooth,
tough skins, like tomatoes or their botanical cousins, the peppers. Lately with bell peppers,
I've been favoring this technique where you hold the pepper really securely by its stem and then
you just filet the sides of meat right off of the fibrous, seedy core. Nice. Now here's the problem.
My knife could easily slip off of that skin and I could cut myself. So what I might do is flip the
piece around, my knife will bite much more easily into the flesh side here. And as soon as it bites,
it's held stable by the food on either side of it. Of course, the problem here is that
the piece is unstable on its rounded skin side. It rocks back and forth. It's more
stable if I flip it back around, but then I have to deal with the slippery skin problem.
I have no idea, which is the better way. So if I've given conflicting advice about
how to cut peppers in the past, this is why, I'm just really not sure. I go back and forth on it.
Something that I talked about in the previous video that I made about knife skills is that there
really is no scientific research about what kinds of cutting tends to result in injuries in a home
kitchen context. There's a little bit of research from the occupational health science field,
looking at people cutting in meat packing plants, but that's really the extent of it. And it's not
really applicable here. So anybody who tells you to do something, because it's going to keep
you safe is not speaking from science, they're speaking from their own anecdotal experience.
And that includes me, just doing the best we can. Which is why I think the best advice is
to just do what feels safe and natural for you and just go nice and slow when you do it.
Again, slicing across as you chop down does help the knife bite through that slippery layer of
skin, and that's good in the soup pot with you. Garlic, people have so many ways of peeling and
chopping garlic. And I've tried all of them, and I've tried all the gizmos and I put 10 million
cloves of garlic into nearly everything I cook. And for what it's worth, this is the method that
I just keep coming back to. Lay the head on the board root side up and smack it. Now that I have
a clove free, I will trim off its root end. That root end is just yucky, plus it's very
firmly attached to the skin. So cut it off. Then I lay the knife over the clove and smack the side.
This breaks the connection between the skin and the clove, allowing you to pick the skin out.
It also pre-chops the clove a little bit for you, but there's still some work to do.
I'm rocking the knife back and forth pretty fast because look, my other hand is nowhere near
this whole mess. It doesn't need to be, there's nothing to stabilize. I'll just bring it over to
wipe the garlic off the knife every now and then so I can get to chopping it again. People ask me
all the time, why I don't use a garlic press or one of the other gizmos that are out there
for doing this. And I have a garlic press and I used to use it every now and then, but I really
find myself never touching it anymore because I just figured, look, I'm cooking. The board
is already dirty. The knife is already dirty. I'm already here. I might as well just use what I've
already got out, instead of getting out a whole other thing that I'm going to have to wash.
I got two other quick tips I want to show you. Broccoli, turn the crown upside down and then just
cut down to release the florets. You spiral around the crown, doing that, one floret at a time,
way easier than any other method I've seen. And when you get down to the stem, you can
slice that up and eat it if you want. I usually do. And the last tip concerns, soft, thin things
like herbs. These can be hard to cut because there just isn't enough for the knife to bite into. So
what people usually do is stack the leaves or bunch them up real tight. And then the
knife is so much more secure. It has more to grab a hold of, in the soup with you.
Dear Lord, promise me that if you've not done so already, you will at least try making vegetable
soup by just cutting up whatever vegetables you have and boiling them in some plain water
with a bunch of salt and a bunch of vinegar. It's easily one of my top five favorite things to eat,
as long as I've got some tomatoes in there too. I swear this is as good and cheap and
easy as it is nutritious. And yes, time to acknowledge the elephant in the room. The new
custom Adam Ragusea eight inch chef knife for sale on now at adamragusea.com.
My associate Colin and I have been working on this project for over a year. I am so happy with
how it turned out. This is everything I have ever wanted in a knife. It's everything I have
ever recommended to people who were going out there trying to find their first good knife.
Go ahead and google this particular German steel we've used. You will see that it's
a great steel for kitchen knives. Maybe not the best, certainly not the most expensive,
but it's probably the best steel you can get that is easy to own. And by that,
I mean it is particularly resistant to tarnish and corrosion and it is easy to sharpen. So this is
hard steel, hard enough that it can get a really, really sharp edge on it. It's tough,
but it's not so hard that it chips easily. It's not so hard that it becomes technically
challenging to sharpen just like a decent pull through multi-stage home sharpener should do
just fine for you to get a really, really sharp edge on this thing. And, of course, having a sharp
knife is the number one knife skill that there is, it makes everything easier. And a sharp knife is
how people don't cry when they cut onions. The blade shape is a pretty standard East/West,
German/Japanese hybrid shape, which I think has become incredibly popular for a reason. It's the
best of all worlds. And the lack of a Western style bolster at the heel makes it way easier
to sharpen. I hate bolsters, so my knife does not have one. My knife does however, have a full tang,
which is an inherently funny term. But what it means is that the knife, the steel here,
extends all the way down into the handle, and through the handle out the other end and out both
sides. This is all one integrated single piece of steel, which is a very solid kind of construction.
And it also helps make the handle heavy, which I think is really, really important.
This is an early prototype that we did, gosh, almost a year ago, and it's good, but it was
just too light. It just threw off the balance. It felt a little cheap in the hand and it just
insubstantial and delicate and not safe. So we decided to spend the extra money, we added,
I think 30 grams of weight to the handle here. And boy, it just makes all the difference in the
world. It feels so solid in the hand. The handle itself is pakkawood, which is basically high-tech
plywood. It's an engineered wood. It's very sustainable and it should last a very long time.
Lauren and I have been using this specific knife at home as our main kitchen knife for six months
now. And you can see it's holding up great. The handle is blue because that is my favorite
color. I will say, when you get it from the factory, it's almost blinding blue,
but it calms down, it tones down after you wash it a couple of times. And, of course, it's got,
vinegar leg is on the right, on the right, and some other details over here on the left,
walk don't run. Hey, that's good advice. And check out this guy on the end cap. I know him. These
markings are all laser engraved and should last a real long time. It comes in a fun custom box.
So it's very giftable. Price is $70 US, which is a little bit more than some knives of comparable
quality that are on the market. But it is like a limited run boutique thing. In fact, we only made
a thousand of these with the initial production run, and the fewer you make the higher your costs
are per knife. So $70 is what we're going with. And yes, only a thousand of these are in existence
right now. They're for sale at adamragusea.com, linked in the description. I suspect we'll sell
out pretty quick, and I'm so sorry, but we are only shipping in the United States for now.
Don't ask why, it's a whole thing, but we're hopeful that if this goes well,
if people seem to really want to buy this knife, then we can do another production run and then
hopefully sell internationally in the future. And for Pete's sake, just make some vegetable soup,
just cut stuff up and boil it, the salt and the vinegar make everything pop and come alive,
and a little raw olive oil at the end on top is delicious. And it aids in the absorption of
fat soluble vitamins. But you've probably heard me say that before, because you're a super fan,
which is why I put our little inside joke on our knife. I hope you like it.