Grandma’s Rustic Potato Slicing Trick Is the Secret to the Finest Soups and Stews

If I might broadly divide cooks into two camps primarily based on their knife methods, there are those that primarily work on the board and people who largely work off it. On-the-board slicing is what we do each time we set an ingredient on a slicing board and chop, cube, slice, smash, or julienne. This strategy is widespread to residence cooks and professionals alike, and in expert palms it’s usually 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, corresponding 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 prefer to discuss with this type of slicing 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 cut back vegetables and fruit to items with nothing greater than a worn-down paring knife. They have been spectacular of their pace and ability, however the outcomes have been certainly extra rustic.

The factor is, although, generally rustic is correct—excellent freaking little brunoise be damned!—and this technique of slicing potatoes for soups and stews I am sharing right here is one among my favourite examples of it. I’ve seen many individuals do it, however I first turned 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 reduce, but additionally identified why it really works so effectively.

In essence, you maintain the potato over your pot (or a bowl of water when 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 measurement, ought to on the entire be wider than they’re thick, with edges which might be jagged and tapered. It’s, counterintuitively, the perfect form as a result of it is an irregular form.

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

This course of occurs to our hand-chunked potato items a lot sooner within the soup pot, however the consequence is similar, little ovoid nubbins of potato worn away by warmth and friction. Within the pot although, there’s an additional advantage: These thinner, irregular edges of potato soften into the broth as they put on away, thickening it gently with their starch to provide a extra cohesive complete. 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 elements half blurred into one another as they cooked whereas nonetheless sustaining some core, softened remnant of themselves.

It is imperfection, perfected.

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