Grandma’s Rustic Potato Chopping Trick Is the Secret to the Greatest 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 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 widespread to dwelling cooks and professionals alike, and in expert arms 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, 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 typically extra completely the area of dwelling cooks. I wish to check with this type 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 scale 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 indisputably extra rustic.

The factor is, although, typically rustic is correct—excellent freaking little brunoise be damned!—and this technique of chopping 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 turned 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 lower, but additionally identified why it really works so properly.

In essence, you maintain the potato over your pot (or a bowl of water when 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 rationale this lends itself so properly to soups and stews, particularly rustic ones which are hearty and filled with long-cooked components that soften into one another, has to do with how these irregular items of potato cook dinner within the pot. In my thoughts’s eye, I consider it like a bit of sea glass that started off a damaged shard with sharp and pointed edges and modern sides at odd and random angles. With time, that tumbler 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 outcome 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 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.

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