If I may broadly divide cooks into two camps based mostly on their knife strategies, there are those that primarily work on the board and people who largely work off it. On-the-board chopping is what we do each time we set an ingredient on a chopping board and chop, cube, slice, smash, or julienne. This strategy is widespread to residence cooks and professionals alike, and in expert arms it’s typically how probably the most exact cuts are made, yielding strips and cubes which have an nearly machine-like uniformity.

Whereas some off-the-board strategies, comparable to finely carving an ingredient with a paring knife or sheeting greens with a Japanese usuba, require extraordinarily detailed handiwork, most of them are much less exact and are typically extra solely the area of residence cooks. I wish to check with this type of chopping as “grandma-style,” since I’ve most frequently noticed it whereas engaged on farms in Europe, the place household matriarchs would sit or stand over a bowl or pot and quickly scale back vegatables and fruits to items with nothing greater than a worn-down paring knife. They have been spectacular of their velocity and ability, however the outcomes have been unquestionably extra rustic.

The factor is, although, typically rustic is true—good freaking little brunoise be damned!—and this methodology of chopping potatoes for soups and stews I am sharing right here is considered one of my favourite examples of it. I’ve seen many individuals do it, however I first grew to become conscious of it a few years in the past whereas engaged on a farm in Galicia, Spain. There, Elia, one of many farmers, confirmed me not solely how to do that particular knife minimize, but additionally identified why it really works so nicely.

In essence, you maintain the potato over your pot (or a bowl of water should you’re planning to chop the potatoes and maintain them for some time earlier than cooking them) and, utilizing a paring knife, slice and break off irregular chunks. The items, whereas roughly all the identical dimension, ought to on the entire be wider than they’re thick, with edges which can be jagged and tapered. It’s, counterintuitively, the best form as a result of it is an irregular form.

The rationale this lends itself so nicely to soups and stews, specifically rustic ones which can be hearty and filled with long-cooked substances that soften into one another, has to do with how these irregular items of potato prepare dinner within the pot. In my thoughts’s eye, I consider it like a chunk of sea glass that started off a damaged shard with sharp and pointed edges and glossy sides at odd and random angles. With time, that tumbler is bumped and scraped by rock and sand because it’s pushed by way of currents and waves, slowly over time chipping, grinding, and carrying right down to a fantastically easy and polished stone.

This course of occurs to our hand-chunked potato items a lot quicker within the soup pot, however the consequence is identical, little ovoid nubbins of potato worn away by warmth and friction. Within the pot although, there’s an additional benefit: These thinner, irregular edges of potato soften into the broth as they put on away, thickening it gently with their starch to supply a extra cohesive entire. As a substitute of a waterier broth bobbing with little squishy cubes of potato and different greens, we get a blended continuum, as if all of the substances half blurred into one another as they cooked whereas nonetheless sustaining some core, softened remnant of themselves.

It is imperfection, perfected.

The Newest
Italian Stress-Cooker Chickpea and Pork Rib Stew

prepare dinner time:


9 hrs 50 minutes

serves:


8