How to Use a Mezzaluna

Video Transcript

"LAURA BANFORD: This is a mezzaluna. It's called a mezzaluna because "mezza" means "part" and "luna" means moon and it's shaped like a half moon. A mezzaluna has two blades and two handles and the way you use it is to rock. When I was getting ready to do this segment today I was looking for my mezzaluna that I've had for years and I couldn't find it. So I had to go and search of another mezzaluna and I think I found the only one left in my town, fortunately, so that I could introduce it to you because I think this is a nice little gadget and type of knife. A mezzaluna is mostly used to chop herbs. You can chop vegetables with it, I guess, but they would have to be thin, fine little vegetables and you're going to get very fine pieces when you do this rocking motion. I have some absolutely gorgeous basil here. And let's take a couple of basil leaves. There are other ways to cut basil, to chop basil, but let's do it this way. What I would do with this is I would stack my basil leaves like that. I'm going to make a little bit of a chiffonade and I could tell you just handling these leaves, they smell terrific. A mezzaluna is not going to bruise the leaves. It's nice and sharp and it's going to just slice them very beautifully without damaging them or ruining them. Gonna take my leaves of basil and I'm going to say, slice them like that. And look at that. This is a sharp blade. Now I have strips of basil. I don't want to get my fingers too close to that blade because I know for first hand how sharp a mezzaluna can be. Let's turn it sideways and cut it up a little more. And you're going to end up with a nice basil chiffonade. They can sprinkle over your caprese salad. You don't know what that is right? That delicious mozzarella and tomato salad with nice olive oil and sprinkle your chiffonade of basil right over it and it's going to smell great and it's going to look great. There you go. Let's try to do that with some parsley, and parsley here. When you lay a mezzaluna down lay it on its side. Let's break off the ends. And get a little bit of chiffonade of parsley, isn't it nice. You have to use a little bit of force with this to really get it to work but that's okay because your hands are safely on the handles. Ain't that great and more fun than chopping parsley, anybody can do that. With your mezzaluna, you're going to have more fun and you're gonna, you can pretend that you're in an Italian farm house kitchen because that's what they're doing there, I can tell you that. When we come back going to do a few more miscellaneous tasks with some knives."