A Brief Meditation On The Use Of Knives
Kitchen knives that is. If you want advice on edged-weapon combat, you'll have to go elsewhere. This is occasioned by my latest batch of dumplings last night when I was chopping kim chi. Previously I had used my santoku knife to do the chopping and it was unsatisfactory. My santoku (from the Cuisinart set I have blogged long ago about buying from Amazon) is a very light knife. A large blade but not a heavy blade. The nappa cabbage kim chi is a pretty fibrous sort of vegetable and it took a lot of pressing to chop it with the santoku.
But I have a really lovely large-bladed stainless steel vegetable cleaver which I have tended not to use. Mistake that. I got it out for last night chopping and it was a wizard at reducing the veg to the size I wanted. The sharp heavy blade took no pressing to cut through a good pile of cabbage. And the width of the blade made taking the chopped product off the cutting board simple.
So once again the wisdom of using the right tool for the job is rammed home. Of course it helps to have the right tool. Not that you're going to find me getting a Tomato Shark any time soon.