Grandma’s Rustic Potato Slicing Trick Is the Secret to the Greatest Soups and Stews

If I might broadly divide cooks into two camps primarily based on their knife strategies, there are those that primarily work on the board and those that principally work off it. On-the-board chopping is what we do each time we set an ingredient on a chopping board and chop, cube, slice, smash, or julienne. This method is frequent to residence cooks and professionals alike, and in expert fingers it’s typically how essentially the most exact cuts are made, yielding strips and cubes which have an virtually machine-like uniformity.

Whereas some off-the-board strategies, reminiscent of finely carving an ingredient with a paring knife or sheeting greens with a Japanese usuba, require extraordinarily detailed handiwork, most of them are much less exact and are usually extra solely the area of residence cooks. I prefer to check with this sort of chopping as “grandma-style,” since I’ve most frequently noticed it whereas engaged on farms in Europe, the place household matriarchs would sit or stand over a bowl or pot and quickly cut back vegatables and fruits to items with nothing greater than a worn-down paring knife. They had been spectacular of their velocity and ability, however the outcomes had been undoubtedly extra rustic.

The factor is, although, typically rustic is correct—excellent freaking little brunoise be damned!—and this methodology of chopping potatoes for soups and stews I am sharing right here is one in every of my favourite examples of it. I’ve seen many individuals do it, however I first grew to become conscious of it a few years in the past whereas engaged on a farm in Galicia, Spain. There, Elia, one of many farmers, confirmed me not solely how to do that particular knife reduce, but in addition identified why it really works so effectively.

In essence, you maintain the potato over your pot (or a bowl of water in the event you’re planning to chop the potatoes and maintain them for some time earlier than cooking them) and, utilizing a paring knife, slice and break off irregular chunks. The items, whereas roughly all the identical measurement, ought to on the entire be wider than they’re thick, with edges which can be jagged and tapered. It’s, counterintuitively, the perfect form as a result of it is an irregular form.

The explanation this lends itself so effectively to soups and stews, particularly rustic ones which can be hearty and filled with long-cooked components that soften into one another, has to do with how these irregular items of potato prepare dinner within the pot. In my thoughts’s eye, I consider it like a chunk of sea glass that started off a damaged shard with sharp and pointed edges and smooth sides at odd and random angles. With time, that tumbler is bumped and scraped by rock and sand because it’s pushed through currents and waves, slowly over time chipping, grinding, and sporting right down to a superbly clean and polished stone.

This course of occurs to our hand-chunked potato items a lot sooner within the soup pot, however the end result is similar, little ovoid nubbins of potato worn away by warmth and friction. Within the pot although, there’s an additional advantage: These thinner, irregular edges of potato soften into the broth as they put on away, thickening it gently with their starch to provide a extra cohesive complete. As a substitute of a waterier broth bobbing with little squishy cubes of potato and different greens, we get a blended continuum, as if all of the components half blurred into one another as they cooked whereas nonetheless sustaining some core, softened remnant of themselves.

It is imperfection, perfected.