Knife Skills
Food Preparation & Nutrition: AQA GCSE, topic 1.1.2
Types of Knives
Different knives serve different culinary purposes:
Cook's knife
- Good for most things, such as slicing onions, crushing garlic and chopping herbs.
Vegetable knife
- Good for cutting small slices of foods, especially vegetables.
Boning knife
- Good for cutting bones out of large chunks of meat, game and poultry.
Filleting knife
- Good for taking fillets out of fish/meat.
Knife Skills
You should cut different fruits and vegetables in different ways. Meat and fish are trickier to cut.
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Fruit and vegetables
- Cutting and preparation techniques include:
- Bridge hold - used when chopping small fruits and vegetables.
- Claw grip - used when chopping long fruits and vegetables.
- Peeling.
- Slicing.
- Dicing.
- Cutting into even slices - e.g. thin julienne strips or thicker baton strips.
Meat
- Knives used - filleting or boning knife.
- Cutting and preparation techniques include:
- Filleting a chicken breast - we do this to get rid of the tenderloin and skin.
- Portioning a whole chicken - you can separate a cooked, whole chicken into eight portions: two drumsticks, breasts, wings and thighs.
- Removing fat and rind (thick skin) from meats like ham.
Fish
- Knives used - filleting or boning knife.
- Cutting and preparation techniques include:
- Filleting - you must use a different method to fillet flatfish (like halibut) and round fish (like cod) because their backbones are in different places. Flatfish normally give four fillets; round fish normally two.
Test yourself on Knife Skills
Which type of knife is best for cutting small slices of foods?
Which type of knife is best for chopping foods like onions?
Which of these foods is easiest to cut?
What type of knife would NOT be used to cut fish?
Which of the following is true for cutting fish?