The most important tool in your kitchen is
your chef’s knife.
So I’m going to show you how to hold it,
how to sharpen it, and how to use it.
First, how to hold it.
You wanna grab the blade between your thumb
and your first finger and wrap your other
fingers around the handle.
This is like choking up on a baseball bat
of a golf club.
You have a little more control.
You’re holding onto the blade so it can’t
go anywhere you don’t want it to go.
If you were to hold your knife like this or
like this, look what can happen very easily
when you’re chopping if you encounter problems.
This would never happen if you’re holding
onto that blade.
Now sharpening your knife is something that
we need to do and we should do at least once
every time we use our knives.
This is a sharpening steel and here’s how
you sharpen using a sharpening steel.
If you put your knife directly on a steel
like this, that’s ninety degrees.
If you cut that angle in half, that’s about
forty-five.
If you cut that angle in half again, that’s
about twenty-two degrees.
That’s the angle at which you want to hold
your knife blade to the steel.
So you’re gonna run your knife down that
steel trying to keep that angle as close to
twenty-two degrees as possible.
Just a few passes on the steel should be good
enough to get it nice and sharp each time
you use it.
You’re gonna keep your knife on the counter.
That’s the safest way to cut something.
So rock your knife back and forth, sawing,
not pushing down, but actually sawing forwards
and backwards and you’ll be able to slice
celery, carrots, zucchini, cucumber, anything
very very easily.
Now I should mention to you that the other
hand that you have here should be holding
the food like a claw.
You don’t want your finger tips out like
this.
Fingertips don’t grow back.
Knuckles will.
So hold your knife like this right against
your hand, fingers tucked under.
You’ll be fine.
So that’s all you really need to know about
how to hold your knife, how to sharpen your
knife, and how to use your knife.
Thanks for watching.
If you’d like to see more of The Basics,
click over here.
If you’d like to learn more about the knives
I used today, click over here.
And if you’d like to leave any suggestions
for Basics ideas, any questions, comments,
put them in the comments section below.
