Grandma’s Trick for Chopping Country Potatoes is the Secret to the Best Soups and Stews

If I could broadly divide chefs into two groups based on their knife technique, one is those who work primarily on the board and the other those who work mostly outside of it. On-the-board cutting is what we do every time we place an ingredient on a cutting board and chop, dice, slice, shred, or julienne. This approach is common for home cooks and professionals alike, and in skilled hands is usually how to make the most precise cuts, yielding strips and cubes that have almost machine-like uniformity.

While some off-the-board methods, such as finely carving an ingredient with a paring knife or preparing sheets of vegetables with Japanese usuba, require highly detailed handcraft, most of them are less precise and particularly Since are the domain of home cooks. I like to refer to this kind of harvesting as “grandma-style”, because I’ve seen it often while working on farms in Europe, where the head of the family sits or stands over a bowl or pot and Quickly cuts fruits and vegetables into pieces. Nothing more than a worn-out knife. They were impressive in their speed and skill, but the results were undoubtedly more rustic.

The thing is, though, sometimes rustic is just right – perfect little brunoise, dammit! – and this recipe for cutting potatoes for soups and stews that I’m sharing here is one of my favorite examples of that. I’ve seen many people do this, but I first learned about it several years ago while working on a farm in Galicia, Spain. There, Elia, one of the farmers, not only showed me how to cut with this specific knife, but also explained why it worked so well.

In short, you place the potatoes over your pot (or a bowl of water if you plan on cutting the potatoes) and hold them for a while before cooking them and, using a paring knife, Cut out irregular pieces and break them up. The pieces, while all approximately the same size, should overall be wider than they are thick, with serrated and thin edges. This, contrary to intuition, is the ideal shape because it is an irregular shape.

The reason it works so well in soups and stews, especially rustic ones that are hearty and full of long-cooked ingredients that melt into each other, has to do with this The point is how irregular pieces of potato cook in the pot. In my mind’s eye, I think of it like a piece of sea glass that starts out as a broken piece with sharp and pointed edges and smooth facets at odd and random angles. Over time, that glass hits and scrapes against rocks and sand as it is pushed through currents and waves, slowly breaking, wearing away and turning into a beautifully smooth and polished stone. .

The process goes much faster in our pot of soup with hand-cut potato chunks, but the result is the same, little oval nubbins of potato spoiled by heat and friction. However, there’s an added benefit to the pot: The thin, irregular edges of the potatoes melt into the broth as they’re rubbed, gently thickening it with their starch to create a more cohesive whole. Instead of a watery broth with little squishy cubes of potatoes and other vegetables, we get a mixed continuum, as if all the ingredients blur into each other while cooking, while still retaining some of the original, soft remains. .

This is incompleteness, perfection.