The World Table

An interactive culinary compendium: recipes, lexicon and study

Technique

Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias

150 dishes across 86 chapters · 0 marked cooked

On the Path of Study: Semester 1: Knife & Fire Foundations, Semester 4: The Braise, Semester 8: The Wok & High Heat, Semester 9: Seafood Mastery

From the Lexicon, Knife Cuts: The Classical Ladder

The French system exists because even cuts cook evenly and plate professionally. The ladder: BRUNOISE (3mm dice) and its baby FINE BRUNOISE (1.5mm); JULIENNE (matchsticks 3mm × 5cm) and BATONNET (6mm × 6cm, the fry); small/medium/large DICE (6/12/20mm); PAYSANNE (thin tiles); CHIFFONADE (herbs and leaves rolled and sliced into ribbons); TOURNÉ (the seven-sided football that has hazed culinary students for a century). MINCE is fineness without geometry; SUPREME is the citrus segment freed from all membrane. Speed comes later; uniformity is the exam, and the claw grip is the tuition.

Read it in the Lexicon →

How to tell it is going right

  • Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
  • The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
  • The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
  • Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
  • They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.

Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.

A chosen film Jacques Pépin Techniques: Proper Knife Skills for Cutting, Chopping and Slicing KQED Food Watch for: Pépin's guiding hand: the curled knuckles that ride the blade and meter the width of every slice, which is where evenness actually comes from rather than from counting millimetres.

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