Thrifty Cooking for Frugal living

Are Your Knife Skills Holding You Back in the Kitchen?

I have cut myself unintentionally hundreds of times. When you cook professionally and you’re constantly under the gun to produce more and more and fast and faster…ouch…it happens, and sometimes it’s serious. Under normal household circumstances it is totally possible to perform like a pro and never cut yourself. All you have to do is follow a few simple rules.

If you hold a knife in your right hand, the left hand must be very disciplined or else it gets punished – and vice versa.

Rule number one, tuck your left thumb behind your left fingers at all times. The thumb could be cut badly, if you forget to do this. Visualize a half inch, hunk of thumb rolling across your cutting board and counter!

Rule number two, be sure your knife is very sharp. A dull knife requires unnecessary sawing and excess pressure and this increases your chances of slipping and slicing yourself. And, a dull knife has its own uniquely unpleasant pain, as if it bruises and slices at the same time.

Rule number three, avoid cutting round objects. If you’re cutting a lemon, or an onion, or a potato, cut it in half first so that you’re dealing with a secure, flat surface. Rolling over and running the knife across your knuckles can cause a surprising but necessary trip to the emergency room, if you have some weight behind the stroke.

Like so many things, practice makes perfect, but it helps to have professional examples close up. Me, I started at 15, working beside a Master Chef and I had the good fortune to observe his technique over and over--this is key. If you see the motion and you pay close attention to the position of the fingers in all sorts of scenarios--cutting cabbage, slicing raw meat, dicing onions, mincing garlic, finely slicing fresh basil or Italian parsley, etc--you start to deeply understand the fundamentals.

On my website, ThriftCultureNow.com, we have created a series of free online cooking classes, using over 85 videos paired with written guidance. Our focus is cooking techniques, frugal recipes and food cost, so we provide you with the knowledge you need to cook from scratch, using a huge variety of ingredients, without using a recipe book.

We have a huge section devoted to knife skills called, First Thing’s First, Master the Blade, and it contains almost 20 videos showing a variety of situations and how to be totally efficient with your knife. This will help make you a great cook.

Not everyone learns the same way, this is a fact. All I have done is replicate the way I learned to be a pro with a chef’s knife. I learned by watching a pro and copying what he did.

If you love food and want to learn to cook better, or if you have children on which you would like to offload some duties, have a look! There are dozens of delicious meal ideas, frugal recipes, cooking technique videos, and the food cost method.

Cooking from scratch is the number one way that families can save more money. Eating take-out or packaged food is very expensive and unhealthy. If you learn the skills required for cooking now, you will enjoy a lifetime of delicious meals. Teaching your children to cook before they’re out of the house is a great way of helping them to be very thrifty in the future – you will save money!

Happy Cooking!

Travis Grier is a Chef and the founder of ThriftCultureNow.com