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

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

Whereas some off-the-board strategies, corresponding to 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 typically extra solely the area of house cooks. I prefer to discuss with this sort of slicing 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 vegetables and fruit to items with nothing greater than a worn-down paring knife. They had been spectacular of their pace and talent, however the outcomes had been unquestionably extra rustic.

The factor is, although, typically rustic is true—good freaking little brunoise be damned!—and this methodology of slicing potatoes for soups and stews I am sharing right here is considered one 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 minimize, but additionally identified why it really works so properly.

In essence, you maintain the potato over your pot (or a bowl of water in case 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 dimension, ought to on the entire be wider than they’re thick, with edges which are jagged and tapered. It’s, counterintuitively, the best form as a result of it is an irregular form.

The rationale this lends itself so properly to soups and stews, particularly rustic ones which are hearty and stuffed with long-cooked substances 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 cup is bumped and scraped by rock and sand because it’s pushed by way of currents and waves, slowly over time chipping, grinding, and carrying all the way down to a fantastically clean and polished stone.

This course of occurs to our hand-chunked potato items a lot quicker within the soup pot, however the end result is identical, 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 entire. 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 substances half blurred into one another as they cooked whereas nonetheless sustaining some core, softened remnant of themselves.

It is imperfection, perfected.