Video: Make Basil Chiffonade

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Learn how to do a basil chiffonade cut in this free cooking tips and techniques video.

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Video Transcript

Hi! I’m Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and today we’re going to show you how to do a shifinod technique which is a French term for these fine little ribbons that we’re going to cut and I got some fresh basil here, so we’re going to shifinod some basils essentially. And basil is a very popular one to use for this technique simply because it comes out nice and pretty, I’ve got some fresh basil here as you can see their stems here and we pull the leafs from the steams and I just want to take the steam off of each leaf and I don’t want to tear it with my fingers I’d rather cut it with a knife. Alright so as you can see there’s a central vain along the back of the leaf in the middle and what we’ll do is take this bigger leaf it’ll be a little easier to show you and we’re just going to roll this from the tip all the way toward the base and just be nice and gentle with it I don’t want to damage it or dent it. So I’m just going to cut these thin strips and what this is used for a lot of times is at garnish or last minute garnish for a dish and as there’s still heat coming off of the dish I cut around that main central vain so we’re going to throw him out. What happens as you throw this on at the very last minute and when you use fresh herbs it causes them to bloom immediately so the flavors much more vibrant which is what we like in our dishes, just making some smooth cuts there. So what we’re left with and again this is the central vain that we wanted to discard and what we’re left with are these nice ribbons of basil and I kind of like to leave them curled like that so they hold some shape and these are the straighten ones obviously and that makes a really nice minute garnish to certain dishes, it’s real nice with fish and shrimp because seafood doesn’t need whole lot of seasoning and fresh herbs really do nice things for fresh seafood like that. So that’s the shifinod technique for fresh basil.