In starting our discussion of cooking techniques we start with the knife. The knife is the basic tool used for breaking things down, removing parts, partitioning or reducing. Anytime you have one large item that needs to have some part separated from other parts or reduced in size you are using a knife or a knife analogue. Blenders, food processors, graters, peelers, rasps; all of these are stand ins for a knife and generally do the same type of job: unwanted parts come off or large parts become small parts. Here at The Skills we are going to spend the next four weeks concentrating on knives. For all cooks they are usually the first tool picked up and it is worth spending the time on them.

Hello and welcome to The Skills! This is The Social Skillet’s weekly cooking skills newsletter. Why does the world need another newsletter, especially a cooking one? Well, we believe that so many folks teach cooking the wrong way these days. They teach a recipe-oriented mish-mash of this and that, none of which really gives you the broad, transferable skill sets that you need to be genuinely successful in the kitchen. Don’t get us wrong, we love recipes. But teaching a pile of recipes with no foundational skills is like teaching a group of football players the playbook without talking about basics. Even the pros practice the core skills like blocking, route running, catching and such. We cooks should do the same as well.