Knife Skills - how to carve, chop, slice, fillet.
By Marcus Wareing, Shaun Hill, Charlie Trotter, Lyn Hall
A home cook's guide to professional food prep and carving at the table.
The first section of the book concentrates on the usual suspects of "How to choose a knife", "knife types, blade, handle...". There is a further section on storage, safety, honing and other sharp tools and even a token section on Japanese blades. Next we get into the nitty gritty - "How to deal with vegetables"... Dicing, Slicing, Chopping, Turning, Trimming, seeding. How to make mirepoix, chiffonade, batonnets etc
Things start to hot up around page 101 with fish and shellfish. Ever wanted to know how to fillet a Skate wing? Doesn't everybody? Good detail on how to deal with a variety of seafood in all shapes and sizes. Page 141 introduces meat, poultry and game. Learn how to butterfly or tunnel bone a leg of lamb, how to shape medallions, how to score fat for crackling, how to carve a chicken, how to carve ham off the bone, how to carve goose and duck and much more. Page 185 runs out of steam a little with how to cut bread and pastries but things pick up again on page 197 when we get to the fruit section.
All in all a good read with plenty of photos illustrating the techniques, but as for knife sharpening we'd recommend you stick to the advice on the Chef's Armoury website.
