Grandma’s Rustic Potato Reducing Trick Is the Secret to the Finest Soups and Stews

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

Whereas some off-the-board strategies, resembling 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 completely the area of residence cooks. I prefer to consult with this type of reducing 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 scale back fruit and veggies to items with nothing greater than a worn-down paring knife. They have been spectacular of their velocity and ability, however the outcomes have been surely extra rustic.

The factor is, although, generally rustic is correct—excellent freaking little brunoise be damned!—and this methodology of reducing potatoes for soups and stews I am sharing right here is one among 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 minimize, 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 are 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 are hearty and stuffed with long-cooked elements 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 glossy 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 carrying right down to a fantastically easy and polished stone.

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

It is imperfection, perfected.

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