My name is Adam and I am not a chef. I am
a person who cooks. I cook food for myself
and my family here in our house.
Cooking for a living, at least in a certain
context, has become a much higher-status occupation
in recent years, and I think that's good in
many ways. It's good when people who do laborious
creative work are recognized as the gifted
artisans that they are, and it's good when
they're paid as such, so thumbs up to that.
But the flip-side is that now this thing that
you and I and most normal people do as a basic
component of domestic life has become not
just a job but a profession — and the card-carrying
members of that guild often look upon us just
cooking in our homes as though we are kinda
practicing without a license.
Nowhere is this toxic dynamic more evident
than in the notion that all of us who cook
must have "knife skills." Certain ways of
handling a knife are among the first things
that a person learns in culinary school and/or
the restaurant trade, and as a result, these
techniques have become the shibboleth that
trained chefs use to distinguish their exulted
class from the rest of us.
Every group of self-important people has something
like this. In the journalism world that I
came from, those of us who've paid our dues
working at legacy news outlets recognize our
fellow club members with obscure and mostly
inconsequential points of style — like using
an Associated Press-style abbreviation for
a U.S. state as opposed to the postal abbreviation
for that state, which is what most normies
do. You use a postal abbreviation, and we
know that you're not a member of the club.
How dare you try to gather and disseminate
timely information of relevance to an audience
(AKA report the news)? You're not in our priesthood!
You're not even wearing the special robes!
That's actually an unfair comparison, because
"knife skills" actually have a practical function
in the professional kitchen. They're not purely
symbolic or ceremonial. What I would challenge
is the notion that what is good for the professional
kitchen is necessarily good for the home kitchen.
That's as absurd as saying what's good for
a professional bodybuilder is good for a guy
who's just trying to stay reasonably fit.
Hi, Jay. Love you, miss you.
Let me try to prove this to you with math.
I think when most people people talk about
"knife skills," they're really talking about
one specific technique known as "the claw."
Most mere mortals stabilize the food with
the pads of the fingers on their non-cutting
hand. In culinary school, they teach you to
tuck your fingertips up so that the worst
you could do is shave a little skin off of
your knuckles. It'd be really hard to cut
into your fingertips doing this.
At least that's the theory. In practice, does
using the claw technique actually prevent
injury? I don't know. I haven't been able
to find any kind of scientific research on
the subject. Certainly, professional cooks
say that it does, and I'm willing to accept
the validity of their "lived experience,"
as the kids say these days — as though there's
any other kind of experience.
But I don't think that it necessarily follows
that the claw is right for all of us. The
claw is awkward. It always makes me feel like
my hand is gonna cramp up. The claw takes
practice. It feels very unstable to me, especially
when I get down to the end of whatever I'm
cutting.
I have no doubt that I could master this technique
if I put in the time and energy, but I simply
see no reason to, when there is a simpler,
and much more natural, and I suspect just
as effective technique of keeping my fingertips
safe, which I will call the "walk, don't run"
technique.
When you walk, your weight is always on the
ground, distributed across your whole foot.
When you run, you actually leave the ground
with every step, you generally kinda bounce
off the ground from your forefoot.
The claw is great for what I would call doing
a "running chop," when the knife is almost
kinda bouncing off of the cutting board and
it never stops moving up and down. It's like
a piston.
If you watch my cooking videos, you could
be forgiven for believing that I cut with
a running chop. But watch when I play this
footage back at the original speed. See? I'm
walking, not running. The knife stops moving
at the bottom of every chop. I bring it back
up again, re-set, and cut. That is "walk,
don't run" cut.
Now, I like to use fast-motion shots in cooking
videos for two reasons: 1) I like to show
you every single action that is necessary
to prepare a meal. I hate cooking shows where
some prepared ingredients come out of nowhere.
Like this Marco Pierre White fish stew video:
"Chunky fish stew, Mediterranean-style. Very
easy, very simple, very quick — 10-15 minutes.
[...] This is a one-pan dish."
All sounds reasonable until he's finished
the dish and then he scatters on some perfectly
julienned vegetables — where did those come
from? And did you include the work of cutting
those in your 10-15 minute time estimate?
Oh and they're blanched, too. That means they
were boiled in water for a minute and then
usually shocked in an ice-water bath — he
needed a pot to do that, so it's not really
a one-pot dish, now is it, Marco?
I think that kind of cooking show gives you
an unrealistic notion of how much time and
work you're signing up for. I don't think
you want to watch me cooking in real time,
so I use fast-motion to quickly show you every
single thing you'll need to do if you want
to make what I'm making.
The other reason I use fast-motion is that
I think it's incredibly satisfying to watch
something, anything being made very very fast.
But I feel bad that, in the process, I might
have given a lot of people the impression
that they too need to be mowing through things
the way that Marco does. Hell, even Marco
says...
"You don't have to turn them into matchsticks,
like I do. I'm quite confident with a knife,
so it's easy for me. But if your knife skills
aren't that great, just chop."
Just chop. Just chop your food into smaller
pieces however you can — however feels comfortable
and safe to you. I think the key is just to
take it slow. I mean, when you're taking a
blade to your body, do you feel compelled
to blast through the job like you've got a
hundred other guys waiting in barber chairs
for their shave? No, you take it slow, because
a sharp razor is a thing to be respected,
like one from Harry's, the sponsor of this
video.
I've been shaving with Harry's for years because
most other razor brands are kinda cheesy and
stupid-expensive. Harry's founders Jeff and
Andy were also sick of over-paying for over-designed
razors, so they bought their razor factory
in Germany and now you can get these scary-sharp
blades for only $2 a refill, delivered straight
to your door.
This is the new travel kit that Harry's sent
me. This will replace my standard travel toiletry
kit consisting of a plastic bag — I'm so
classy. You get travel-size shave gel, post-shave
balm, body wash — all in quantities that
are small enough for airport security. I always
like the scents of Harry's products — they
strike me as adult, and not trashy. You also
get this typically gorgeous Harry's weighted
handle.
You can get $5 off your Harry's kit at harry's.com/adamr.
You'll be doing us both a favor. That link
is in the description. $5 off. Thank you,
Harry's.
As I said, when wielding a blade, I think
working slow will keep you out of most trouble,
and here's another analogy from the exercise
world: The deadlift — that most gloriously
troglodytic exercise of lifting something
very heavy off the ground and putting it back
down again.
The "dead" in deadlift means you're supposed
to start each repetition of the lift from
a dead stop. The weight is entirely on the
floor, no longer supported at all by your
body at the bottom of each rep. That's as
opposed to kinda bouncing it off the floor
like this — you're never really fully putting
it down here.
There are many reasons to start the deadlift
from a dead stop, but one of them is to re-set
your form. You get your chest out and your
back straight and rigid before every single
pull. If you don't don't do this, you start
to look like Drake — his back is all rounded
and he's exposing himself to the possibility
of grievous spinal injury, which is why everyone
made fun of him for this.
Just like a deadlift, I re-set my form every
chop when I'm cutting food. If I became distracted,
if a child suddenly came barreling into the
kitchen or something, I don't think I would
slip and cut myself, because I'm reestablishing
my concentration on every single stroke. Nothing
is on auto-pilot here. If I got distracted,
I would just naturally stop.
There is, of course, a reason that professional
chefs tend to use the claw and a running chop
instead of doing what I do: What I do is super-slow.
But I only have one onion to cut up. They
have to get through a 50 lb bag of onions.
And here comes the math part. This half of
an onion I chopped in 35 seconds — that's
by walking. This half I chopped up in 15 seconds
by running. That means that I can save myself
a grand-total of 40 seconds on my day by using
a running chop on the whole onion that I need
for my dinner. Big deal.
But if I were chopping a hundred onions for
a restaurant, 40 seconds an onion adds up
to more than an hour saved. That actually
is a big deal. Professionals need to cut quick.
I don't, and you probably don't either.
It's rather like driving. I drive like a grandpa
and I am proud of it, because I understand
math. A whole bunch of people in my neighborhood
make the same basic 8-mile drive as I do every
morning when I take my kid to school. It takes
me about 20 minutes, which means I'm averaging
24 miles per hour, which is not bad for city
traffic.
And I see all these a-holes around me doing
psycho demolition-derby Olympics just so that
they can can get to the red light and start
waiting a few seconds before I do, and for
what? Let's say, very generously, that their
average city traffic speed is 30 miles per
hour, instead of my 24. They've saved a whopping
four minutes on their drive. Wow, whatever
will you do with all of your spare time? That's
assuming that you made it there alive — you
didn't crash and die.
In contrast, if you're a long-haul trucker
doing a thousand-mile route, pushing your
average highway speed from say, 60 to 70 is
gonna save you more than two hours. And that
actually matters.
It's all about scale, people. If you're doing
anything remotely hazardous at a modest scale,
just do it slowly. There's no point in doing
it fast.
Now, you might be wondering, "Well, Adam,
do you have any evidence to back up the notion
that cutting slowly with your fingers out
is just as safe as cutting fast with your
fingers in?" No, I don't have any evidence,
but neither do you.
I have scoured the scientific literature for
any quantitative research on accidental injuries
involving kitchen knives, and there's basically
nothing. There's lots of research about intentional
knife injuries — stabbings, suicides — that
makes sense to me. There's lots of research
about repetitive stress injuries involving
knives — that's of great relevance to the
meatpacking industry, so that makes sense
to me.
But what I would think is a basic area of
home and occupational safety is strangely
under-researched. We don't know what kinds
of cutting in the kitchen tend to make people
hurt themselves.
The best I can do is give you some sense of
what kinds of foods tend to be associated
with knife injuries in the kitchen. Here in
the U.S. we have something called the National
Electronic Injury Surveillance System. It's
a public database online where you can see
anonymized records of hospital emergency department
visits filtered by what kind of consumer product
may have been involved. So here's what I downloaded
— every single ER visit in the States from
2018 involving product code 0464 — that's
"cutlery; knives," — about 7,000 incidents
from 2018, the most recent year available.
Each of these has what they call a "narrative"
attached to it — "33-year-old male was cutting
limes with a knife and cut left thumb." Or,
"56-year-old female states she was making
dinner when she became angry..." You know
what you did!
I did a little analysis of these narratives
and came up with this visualization — it's
linked in the description. This shows the
number of times that specific foods are mentioned
in these narratives about knife injuries.
Most often mentioned is the generic "vegetables"
or "veggies." Right under that is avocado
— 151 mentions of avocados in these ER narratives.
There actually are a couple studies about
avocado cutting injuries specifically, because
there really has been a sudden epidemic of
such injuries accompanying the sudden popularity
of the avocado here in the States. After avocado,
we have the generic "meat," followed by potato,
onion, chicken, apple, melon. I notice a little
pattern here — lots of round, hard things.
Look how high lemons and limes are on this
list.
From this data, I would guess — and this
is just a guess, this is not definitive, this
is not scientific, this is my guess — I
would guess that what this tells us is that
cutting round things is one of the most dangerous
things that we can do — things that can
roll. Therefore hopefully we can protect ourselves
by making round things flat before we do anything
else to them, which is a standard technique
of "knife skills."
But again, that's just a guess, and it's one
that the scientist I consulted on this cautioned
me against making too hastily. Thanks, by
the way, to Dr. Wendy Shields at the Johns
Hopkins Center for Injury Research and Policy
who checked my work on all this.
If you're a public health researcher or graduate
student, I think there's a great opportunity
to do some needed work in this area. But in
the meantime, with nothing but my own common
sense to go by, I will continue to do a nice,
slow, walking chop with my fingertips straight
out, because that helps me hold the food more
stably.
You do you — get your food into smaller
pieces however feels right to you. Just don't
let a some chef bully you into thinking you're
not a real cook because you can't go ptptptptptptptptptptptptpt.
Speed kills. Arrive alive.
