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04.26.2004

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chop chop how to prep + cut  your veggies 
by Yee-Fan Sun
 | 1 2 3
continued from page 1

garlic
The first step in working with garlic is getting off that pesky peel. Place your clove flat on the cutting board, and slice off the root end. Lay the fat end of the side of a chef's knife (close to the handle) on top of the clove, then give the blade a firm pound with either the ball of your palm or the side of your fist. (If your recipe calls for whole or sliced cloves, you'll want to do a series of lighter pounds rather than the big, satisfying smash). The skin should now come off easily. Trim away any nasty brown parts.

If your recipe calls for whole cloves, you're good to go. Otherwise, you'll be using the chef's knife again. Slice the garlic clove crosswise into thin slivers to create slices. For minced garlic, gather and pile up the slices. Use your free hand to keep the end of the knife more or less in place while you chop in a rapid rocking motion. You'll need to stop every once in awhile to corral the flying garlic bits back into a little pile. Continue chopping till the pieces are very fine.

onions
To chop onions, cut the onion in half longitudinally, slicing from root to stem. Slice off the dried-out stem end and discard, then peel off the papery skin as well as any tough outer layers. Place the halved onion cut-side down on your chopping board. Holding your chef's knife parallel to the cutting surface, make a few horizontal cuts, stopping just short of the root. Next, you'll make a series of vertical cuts in the onion going from stem to root. Finally, slice up the onion cross-sectionally and watch your onion fall away into perfect little diced bits.


bell peppers
Unlike garlic and onions, bell peppers generally aren't peeled (the exception is when they've been roasted). Your first step in prepping a raw bell pepper, then, is to cut off the walls of the pepper. Slice the pepper close to the stem, and cut from the stem end down to the bottom tip. Do this for all four sides (or three, if you have a three-sided pepper). You'll be left with four flattish sections of pepper, plus the central core and stem. Discard the core. Meanwhile your pepper sections are likely to have some white membrane-y ribs and seeds clinging inside. Trim these away using your paring knife.

With the skin side down, cut each section into strips using the chef's knife. If you want your peppers diced, line up the strips and slice across. To get a really fine dice, just make your initial strips as thin as possible.

 

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