Today I'm gonna try and master basic knife skills. I've been cooking for
myself ever since I graduated high school which was like nine years ago and
during those nine years I've probably cooked myself thousands of meals chopped
tens of thousands one about tens of thousands lots of vegetables and have
never actually put any intentional effort towards getting better at using a
knife but I know that there is a much better way to do it and today I want to
figure out what that way is I've got a sharp knife cutting board and a crap-ton
of vegetables okay to get a baseline of my current skills I'm gonna chop an
onion and see how long it takes me to chop that onion without looking at any
tutorials or trying any new techniques yeah I haven't even started chopping
this thing up and I'm already crying Oh making me a minute to get all the skin
off the chopping skills here you go do this action
I feel like know that I'm doing this I'm doing so many things wrong I don't know
if you can see this that okay so that's onion number one without looking at any
tutorials oh my god I'm just gonna be crying
this entire pity uh-huh and that took three minutes 15 seconds oh okay
now I'm gonna watch a couple tutorials and see what I can learn drew first what
you want to put your finger and your thumb at the very back of the knife and
wrap your fingers around it that's crazy I've been holding a knife like this
forever but apparently you're supposed to hold it like like this with your
finger and thumb actually on the knife okay this is great this is exciting
learning new stuff see this feels super weird I'm sure it's gonna get better but
oh yeah oh oh I think that dice looks a lot better
it still feels SuperDuper awkward I think he's just gonna take chopping a
whole bunch of vegetables and starting to get used to it and getting
comfortable with it and then I'm gonna really start to notice the benefits the
goal here is not to rush the goal is to learn but also oh dang that is so
satisfying well not bad I think we can do better
though
save the good-good minute off the original time there very good super
weird I just noticed this my eyes are not
reacting as much to the onions as they did at the start is that just a thing to
your eyes just get used to it okay this is gonna be my last onion of the day
this is onion number ten and I'm just starting to rack up way more onions then
I think I could ever use more okay so original time three minutes 15 seconds
now it's about two minutes 20 seconds let's say that I have shaved off on
average one minute probably chop about a hundred onions per year let's say I live
for another 60 years is 6,000 minutes and therefore 100 hours so I have saved
100 hours of my life learning how to chop onions correctly nice alright so
it's been about a month since I filmed that video and I just wanted to give it
a bit of a break to see if the skills and habits that I developed in that
initial like three hours would translate into actually cooking in the real world
and it absolutely did pulling the knife with the finger here and the thumb on
the one side no longer feels weird at all same with doing the claw like that
feels really good it's way safer I can cut vegetables way
more like accurately if I were to do this again I would probably not focus on
speed as like the goal post of success for this skill because when I was
watching back to footage I was like this is a pretty good way to cut off a finger
so let's do it again I would first focus on technique form and then
start working on speed for those of you who are interested in learning this
skill or spend a lot of time in the kitchen I highly recommend giving it a
shot I spent about three hours or so of deliberate practice working on the
different forms and cutting techniques and during that time was able to form a
habit that is extremely useful that I'm gonna be able to take with me for the
rest of my life anyways thanks for watching I will see you in the next
video