How to Use a Cleaver

Video Transcript

"LAURA BANFORD: Now we're going to use a cleaver. This is a small little Japanese-style cleaver. Most cleavers are much bigger, a butcher's cleaver would probably be double this size and at least double the height. The use of a cleaver is to make one swift cut, okay. You're not sawing like you would for a serrated blade and you're not rocking like you would for a chef's knife. What you need to do is you gotta hold your cleaver the same way you hold most knives, lay it across your fingers, you're going to wrap your fingers, around and your index finger is going to be right under the guard, okay. Hold your thumb right at the neck of the knife. You can make sure that your fingers are out of the way for this one. What you want to do is identify the spot that you want to cut and hold the ingredient still with your non-dominant hand, in this case, my left hand and just give it one smooth stroke, like that. Let's do it again. Identify where you want to have it, like that. Let's do it with, I have some king crab legs here. This might take a couple of whacks because, that's okay because if you're cutting through bone or in this case shell, it might not, you might not able to do it with one stroke but let's see. Nope. Here it goes. Important in that, and the reason that my third whack worked and the other one didn't is you want to identify the joint. Okay. And this is important if you're hacking a part of chicken, carving a chicken with the cleaver. Here is the joint right here let's see if we can do it. There it goes. Okay if it takes more than one, okay. Let's do it again here. See my joint right here. I'm going to hold this firm, it's going to be at a little bit of an angle. Nope, that's not working. Let's try it here, with the claw right through. And there you go. We'll see you in the next clip."