stlbites.com – st. louis food blog of bill burge

Lauren, my dear, it is not the brunoise

Nov 15, 2008 cooking, general food

Although I fell asleep with boredom in my first attempt to watch Top Chef New York, I was awake just long enough to take personal offense to Lauren’s comment that the brunoise is “the hardest knife cut.”  Having spent countless hours practicing for the first portion of the Jr. Culinary Olympic competition (a knife skills practical exam) I know a thing or two about knife skills and brunoise being hardest is simply not the case.

Technically, a brunoise is a 1/8” x 1/8” x 1/8” dice.  Period.  Because a julienne is 1/8” wide people will sometimes say a brunoise is a julienne turned 90 degrees and cut again.  That could be the case, but a julienne is technically 1/8” x 1/8” x 2-2 ½”.  If you were cutting a lot of brunoise you’d probably want to start with something longer.

These are classic French knife cuts.  They’re what the American Culinary Federation uses for their competitions and they’re what culinary schools teach.  They have these standards so that as you roll from one kitchen to another there’s no need for a chef to explain what size they’re looking for when you’re asked to cut something up.  Your chef could simply say, “Everyone prep me up a 9-pan of brunoised carrots.” Then, because everyone knows what a brunoise is, he could collect those pans from the entire staff and mix them all together.  They should all be identical.  It’s a beautiful thing when a few people in a kitchen can all be so precise with their knife skills that they can each brunoise a different vegetable to later combine into an identically brunoised mix of vegetables.  They can then drop them into something like a consommé and leave informed diners quietly applauding their skill and attention to detail.

Of course your chef could also be in the mood to teach you a lesson and put a 1/3 pan of brunoised veg on your prep list alone.  It’s a bitch to do alone, and there are stories of chefs hazing cooks by telling them to brunoise whole sacks of potatoes that later get turned into mashed potatoes for staff meal.

There are a number of cooks and chefs that say these skills are fussy and unnecessary.  They tout that food should be more natural.  It shouldn’t be so precise.  Like anything though, there’s a time and a place for it, and it’s generally these same people that have poor knife skills and can’t brunoise for shit in the first place.

For people competing, students learning, or passionate home cooks interested in having knife skills capable of wowing their friends and neighbors, you can even buy 3D models of the knife cuts.

As for the true “hardest knife cut,” it is, without question, the tourné.  It’s the one you rarely see in restaurants, and the one most hated amongst the “food should be natural” sect.  It took me a long time to get good at and a very short time to completely lose the skill.

To create them the first thing you need is an incredibly sharp knife possible of gliding through vegetables in consistently smooth strokes.  If you don’t have one, you will fail.  Your chef will yell at you (in my case coach).  He will have immediately not only spotted the rough texture of your cuts, but also heard the difficulty of your blade.

Next you’ll cut yourself a 2” long block of your preferred vegetable that is just slightly too wide.  You’ll then “turn” your knife in an arch through it seven times.  Each time you take a stroke you rotate it slightly so that each subsequent stroke slightly overlaps the preceding one.  You get only one shot at this.  There’s no going back to even out a side.  If you attempt to, you will simply whittle them away.

One shot.  Seven perfect strokes.  One tourné.

The next time you’re making mashed potatoes try turning some yourself.  At best, when you find yourself seated in a restaurant that serves you some tournés, you’ll be able to appreciate the difficulty of this classic technique.  At worst, potatoes are easiest to practice on and they yield edible failure.

Tags: brunoise, classic knife cuts, competition, french knife cuts, Top Chef, Tourné