I used to say I was fearless when it comes to food. I’ve eaten crickets on television. Deboned a dozen quailusing the glove method. Survived being doused with caul fat in a freak cooking-school accident.
但是我有一个心照不宣的猪殃殃的恐惧。我就站outside the windows of Peking duck restaurants and watch confident cooks use their full arm strength to hammer through the birds' bones, cartilages, and tendons; I'd imagined myself wielding those massive rectangular knives myself. And my mind would always jump-cut to an image of the fingers of my right hand lying motionless and bleeding on a cutting board.
Ridiculous. Millions of cooks around the world use cleavers daily, for everything from butchering to making radish roses. I wanted to wield a knife like that with skill, not fear.
So I took a deep breath. Found a teacher. And picked a cleaver to start with: a Chinesecai dao.
To the uninitiated cook (read: me), it’s easy to assume that a Chinese cleaver is a lot like the Western variety: a blunt instrument primed for the most Hannibal-like moments of kitchen violence. But as Grace Young, Chinese cooking expert and the author ofStir-Frying to the Sky’s EdgeandThe Breath of a Wok, explained to me in her Soho kitchen recently, cai dao actually means “vegetable cleaver.” The term alone challenged my Western cooking sensibilities. Prepping onions, ginger, and peppers requiresprecision, not brute force. On that point, Young agreed. But she assured me that the vegetable cleaver, despite (or because of) its shape, was the perfect tool for just that kind of precise work. “Meat cleavers are intended to cut through bones,” Young explained. “With the vegetable cleaver, you have more control.”
Unlike Western meat cleavers, the cai dao is smaller, with a thinner, more lightweight blade that Young assures me is able to do everything from julienne scallions to slice slabs of steak. “I have all kinds of knives—Western, santoku—but my favorite is the vegetable cleaver,” Young says. In fact, Young owns not one, but three of them in varying sizes, though she prefers the smallest one in her collection. “When you're choosing a knife, whether it's a cleaver or a chef's knife, you need to find one that feels most comfortable in your hand,” she says. Young’s favorite cleaver clocks in at about half a pound, making it shockingly lightweight and easy to maneuver.
But the value of any knife is in the slicing—and the dicing, smashing, and julienning. In order to train me in proper cai dao technique, Grace and I will cook aspicy dry-fried beef—a recipe from Young'sStir-Frying to the Sky’s Edge—that requires a range of knife cuts. First things first: Young shows me how to hold the cleaver. “You want a pinch grip. You're really squeezing the handle with your thumb and forefinger, and your forefinger is relaxed, and your other three fingers are holding the handle,” she explains.
Once I’m holding the cleaver to her satisfaction, it’s time to learn one of the two main styles of cleaver cutting: High Technique. Young learned the term (and refined her skills) in a class taught at the Institute of Culinary Education by veteran cleaver guru Norman Weinstein. Considering its exalted name, it’s no surprise that this style, while not as soul-shriveling as the downward thwack of a meat cleaver, is pretty darn tricky. “The knife starts off the board. You start to cut near the tip of the blade, and then you're stroking down in a forward motion, using almost the entire blade to follow through.”
Watching Young demonstrate, cutting 2-inch segments of carrot, gives me a wildly unearned feeling of confidence.I’ve got this, I murmur to myself. I’ve got it, that is, until I pick up the cleaver again to reproduce her movements on a new carrot.
一切感觉错了,像我切割食物a super-sharp, oversized ruler. I’m accustomed to the rocking motion and constant cutting-board contact you experience with a Western chef’s knife. The smooth forward motion and “follow-through” Young describes feel downright strange, but I manage to cut 2-inch logs from the carrot without too much trouble. When I attempt to slice those logs into slabs, however, the shame sets in. After shaving off a rounded edge of carrot to give the log a flat, non-wobbly surface to rest on, I attempt to use High Technique to cut the even, ¼-inch-thick slabs that Young was able to produce without batting an eyelash. But though I’m holding the cleaver properly (and gripping the carrot in the standard “claw grip” every careful cook knows), my slices resemble tiny triangular doorstops instead of even slabs. And all those uneven slices don’t bode well for our stir-fry.
“The reason why you want slices to be uniform is because if you're stir-frying and all the pieces are the same size, they will cook at the same time,” Young explains. In reply I begin muttering to myself about the shameful nature of my carrot slabs. Young encourages me. “It's going to take you a little while," she says. "The first slice is always the hardest.”
I begin to separate my carrot slices into “success” and “failure” slices, and Young nods her approval, munching on my errant carrot scraps. “If you're a Type A personality, stir-frying is perfect for you,” she says. Wait, what?
Eventually it’s time to get low. Low Technique, that is.
This cutting style (also termed by Weinstein) feels more familiar: The cai dao maintains constant contact with the cutting board, and you cut the food with the middle of the knife, rocking the blade through the ingredient until it reaches towards the handle-end of the blade. I stack 2-3 carrot slabs, and the super-thin, sharp edge of the cleaver glides through effortlessly, leaving a pile of matchsticks in its wake.
Still, some matchsticks are burlier than others, and I fret audibly, leading Young to both shame and psychoanalyze me in front of Epicurious’ staff photographer. “I think you have to get over all this judgment, Adina. You're very self-critical. Your initial reaction is ‘my first cut should be perfect.’ You've got to put in the practice!”
Thankfully, julienning the celery is far easier on me (and my ego) than those tough root vegetables. I just follow Young’s lead, cutting the trimmed stalks into 2-inch segments (using High Technique) before turning them rounded-side down and cutting them into scant ¼-inch matchsticks (using Low Technique, natch). Shredding scallions was even more satisfying: I managed to achieve restaurant-style wisps by splitting 2-inch segments of scallion lengthwise with High Technique, then slicing each scallion half, cut-side up, into fine shreds with Low Technique (with a decidedly smug look on my face). Riding high on a wave of cleaver confidence, I faced the toughest challenge: mincing ginger.
Anyone who’s cooked with fresh ginger at home knows the drill: Unless you’re grating it, it’s ridiculously difficult to cut it beyond the “finely chopped” stage. And that translates into those near-raw, aggressive-tasting bits of chopped ginger scattered throughout your stir-fry. I can never cut my ginger into particularly tiny bits with my Western chef’s knife, but Young showed me how the super-thin straight edge of the cai dao (almost like a giant razor blade, I realized) could shave ginger slices so thin they curled off the blade. (Grace's father taught her “when you enter a restaurant kitchen and they see you slice ginger, they know if you're the real thing”—watch him slice gingerhereat the 1:27 mark.)
After shaving a thin slice off the peeled knob of ginger so that it could rest flat on the cutting board, I set to work. At first, my slabs were stiff, thick cardboard compared to Young’s tissue-thin slices. Then I started using the knuckles of my non-dominant hand to help control the thickness of the slices, holding the ginger in the claw grip and letting the wide expanse of the cleaver blade slide up and down my fingers. The slices instantly became thin—so thin that, like ideal slices of smoked salmon, you could read a newspaper through them—and I felt more in control of the blade, too. I stacked 4-5 of those thin slices and then used Low Technique to slice them into wispy shreds. I turned the pile of shreds 90 degrees and sliced them using Low Technique again, into bits so tiny they were almost powdery. I blinked with astonishment at what the cai dao could do.
After that triumph, the rest of the prep flew by. I gently crushed the garlic cloves with the flat of the blade, and cut them into a similarly tiny mince. And finally, I cut segments of flank steak across the grain into slices, then cut those slices into a julienne the same size as the carrots and celery. With our cleaver-prepped ingredients at the ready, we were finally ready to stir-fry.
First in the wok: the carrots and celery with a few dried chiles. Next, the beef, seared until its liquid evaporates and it begins to sizzle. Then soy sauce and the powdery bits of ginger and garlic went in the pan for 10 seconds before the vegetables were returned to the wok and the scallions, sesame oil, salt, and pepper were sprinkled over.
The entire dish cooks in just 5 minutes, Young points out. Is that a testament to the master teacher in the room? Perhaps the (ahem) star student? No. Young and I know what's up. The stir fry is perfect because the ingredients were finely and evenly cut, a feat that was only possible with that formerly fearsome, shockingly suave blade known as cai dao.
