How to Hold a Chef's Knife

Video Transcript

"LAURA BANFORD: Now, I'm going to illustrate some basic hand positions and movements with the chef's knife. This is my 6-inch chef's knife. It's the one I go to for most utilitarian tasks. And I've selected celery because it has nice even stalks and it's a good, good way to practice. And again, celery is inexpensive so if you want to practice yourself, it's a good way to do it. Okay. I have two celery stalks with the bottoms and the tops, bottoms and tops cleaned off. What I'm going to do, actually it should be like this. Let's say you want to make diced celery. I'm going to cut down with the tip of my knife. So we're going to make kind of a uniform, it's not too uniform, uniform dices there. I have my knife in my hand, okay? Knife lies like this across your fingers. You wrap your fingers around. Turn your knife perpendicular to your cutting board. Make sure your cutting board is not going to move. Anchor it nice and tight there, okay? With your left hand or your non-dominant hand, you're going to have your fingers curved. And you're going to slice starting with about an inch from the tip and rocking down. You're going to use a rocking motion. And then you're going to slide your knife slightly ahead. As you do that, and do it slowly to learn, you're going to move your non-dominant hand, your fingers or your non-dominant hand, back so they're always out of range of the knife. Again, they're curved under, and the knife, you have a rocking motion. As you pick up confidence, you can increase your speed. I made a mistake there. Never drag the edge of your knife along the cutting board. It dulls it. Always use the spine of the knife. Let's turn them over this time so that they don't move as much. A little rocking motion. Those are coming out more uniform. I guess we should do it cupped down, see? Those are coming out nice and uniform. Always moving your fingers back. When we come back, we're going to use a cleaver."