Clean & Dice Parsley

Video Transcript

"Alright I’m Louis Ortiz on behalf of Expert Village and I’m going to show you guys how to clean parsley and dice it. It sounds like a simple procedure I’m using parsley simply because it’s kind of a universal garnish that people use for all different kinds of vegetables, meats, side dishes, things of that nature. So first and foremost we’ve already rinsed our parsley and what I’m going to do is just simply take the leaves and de-stem this guy so that we don’t get any stems when we dice this we’ll discard those stems and I yet to see a recipe or a cooking procedure for parsley stem so if you have one you can use those otherwise I’m throwing mine in the trash. Now what happens too a lot of times is when people try to dice this up there’s a lot of moisture left in it so it tends to all stick together and it becomes this very dark green paste and it’s not as separated as it needs to be, so I’ve got a clean dry towel here and all I’m really going to do because parsley is pretty hardy any who is just pat the moisture off of this, now you can use paper towels if you’d like again I use a clean dry towel it still works fine. And you can see just by doing that, that we’ve separated it quiet a bit so the moistures gone they’re nice and separated, I’ve got a Sinkotua knife here that I’m going to use and again I’m going to use my fingers as a guide I’ve said that throughout the other videos, you don’t want to push the parsley this way with your fingertips cause they might get in the way but by using your knuckles and keeping your fingers curved in it keeps your knife from doing that. Again use a nice sharp knife and we’re just going to go ahead and push this through and chop along and I’m right handed so I usually go left to right this direction and as you’ll notice as I’m cutting this it separating real nice and that’s because it’s dry and this is you know parsley’s not real expensive anyway but it looks nice when you get a good green bunch and it dresses up potatoes up real nicely, all different kinds of potato dishes, also it can be a garnish for certain soups just in the center of the bowl and such and this way too if you’ve got nice dry parsley and you’ve taken all the moisture out of it it’s a lot less acceptable of staining your cutting board because it’s nice and dry, when it stays wet pigments come out of there and they go straight into your cutting board a lot of times and if you’ve got a sharp knife you’re making cuts into the cutting board which means it’ll seep into the little crevasses there and turn your cutting board green in the center. Okay let me give this one more sweep…okay and there we go, so you’ll notice as you can handle this it sprinkles real nicely, it’s nice and dry, it’s got a nice bright green color to it and we’re ready to garnish whatever dish you see fit there."