Chef Massimo’s Tips for Prepping Your Vegetables for Cooking
When it comes to food prep, slicing and dicing vegetables can seem like an endless task. Today on The Marc and Mandy Show: Cooking On The Road, Chef Massimo Capra demonstrates a few of the ways that you can prep your veggies more efficiently!
Expert Tip # 1: Dicing An Onion
Most people assume they know the right way to cut onions, but do they really? Chef Massimo recommends this method:
- Cut the tip and the end of the onion off before slicing the onion in half, using the root of the onion to gauge the halfway point.
- Once you’ve sliced the onion in half, it should be easy to peel off any skin.
- Next, use your knife to cut almost all the way through the onion, so that you have several parallel knife strokes, but the onion is still in one piece.
- Next, rotate the onion so that you are cutting perpendicular to your last set of cuts. At this stage, you should be liberating small pieces of onion without much mess or hassle.
Expert Tip # 2: Julienning An Onion
Julienning is a helpful technique to use if you are preparing something like a stir fry or a salad. Chef Massimo recommends this method:
- Cut the tip and the end of the onion off before slicing the onion in half, using the root of the onion to gauge the halfway point.
- Once you’ve sliced the onion in half, it should be easy to peel off any skin.
- Next, you want to remove the root of the onion. You can do this by taking a half onion and making an asymmetrical cut off of the root side of the onion.
- To julienne the remainder of the onion, use your knife to make even slices all the way through the onion, working your way from the smaller end of the onion half, to the widest part, to the smaller end again.
Want to learn more? Watch the video above for more detailed instructions and to learn a few more expert-approved techniques. Thanks for watching!