How to Prepare to Cook Cabbage

"Hi! This is Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and today we are going to show you how to break down a head of cabbage. I'm going to use just a basic chef's utility knife and I want to peel off these outer leaves that have already kind of become dry. We are not really concerned about using those in any eatable fashion, so we'll remove those. Some folks will like to put the point of a knife in it at an angle to cut out the core. It's actually a little dangerous that way simply because if you cut outwards, you can't guide the knife the way that you really like to and you are going to have an uneven cut. If you cut towards yourself, then there is a possibility of falling on your fingers. So what I like to do is just make a cut at the base and cut this in half so we have two halves. As you can see in cabbage, the core is quite a bit prevalent throughout the middle of this so we want to get around that and here's all the good nice purple that we want to use. So we are going to go ahead and take this half and cut that in half and now that we have a foot to cut on, its a little bit safer to cut with. We'll cut down this direction and then we'll have a couple of quarters. Now this is much much easier now to deal with. You can make a cut going this direction if you like. Some folks like to leave it on the cutting board this way. It really just depends on the personal preference. I usually make a couple of V cuts this way and that way the core just comes right out and you are all done. So now we have all this usable product to use. We'll pull that leaf off and get this out of the way. Now it just becomes a matter of shredding. You just want to make some thin cuts along the grain this way so that it peels off in such a fashion that it still looks nice. Use your knuckles as a guide. Just cut some thin shreds this way and we can also use a mandolin slicer if you have one and we can show you how to do that in another video but that is the way you use just a knife from start to finish. That's pretty much the easiest and safest way to break down a head of cabbage. You could braise this with bacon and make some braised cabbage in a real nice chicken stock if you wanted or we could use it to dress up fish tacos, throw in salads or make a nice Cole slaw."