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Serious question, did anyone else watch knife skills get sloppy in their kitchen over the last 10 yrs?
I was prepping onions next to a kid we hired last spring at our spot in Tucson and he was rocking the blade back and forth like he was sawing firewood. Made me think about how different things look now. When I came up in the early 2000s my old chef would smack the cutting board if your knuckles lifted off the blade, and you learned the pinch grip or you learned it again the hard way. Now I see guys come out of school who can talk about immersion circulators and fermenting koji all day, but ask them to brunoise a shallot and it takes 20 minutes. Part of it is the cooking shows made the flashy stuff look cool, part of it is nobody wants to stand there and do 50 pounds of mirepoix when a robot coupe exists. I still make every new hire do a week of pure knife work before they touch a pan, and about half of them act like I'm hazing them. So what do you all do, do you still drill the basics or have you just accepted the food processor is going to win?
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paige5143d ago
Did the kid at least have a cool story about his koji? Because that seems to be the trade off now. You can talk about fermentation for an hour but God forbid you know how to cut an onion without turning it into mush. I came up the same way and yeah the knuckle smack was real, you learned fast or your fingers paid for it. Here is the thing though, a robot coupe can't feel the difference between a shallot that needs a fine dice and one that needs a rough chop, and it sure can't adjust when the product is soft. I still make new hires do knife work too and I get the same eye rolls, but I would rather train someone for a week than fix their bad habits for a year.
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