A good knife – the only ESSENTIAL piece of kitchen equipment

I’ll go out on a limb and say a good knife – and it’s my belief that to start with you really only need one – is the only essential piece of kitchen equipment you need. OK, you need a frying pan and pots and an ice-cream machine (I love ice-cream machines) and if you’re Heston Blumenthal you MUST have a low temperature cooking bath. But none of those are really essential. A knife however is.  

Stay sharp

If there’s one thing that can improve your cooking immediately it’s getting a sharp knife. Most home cooks seem to battle away with knives so blunt they can barely cut through butter and then wonder why they can’t do all that fancy chopping like TV chefs.

Do this simple test – try and chop a tomato without tearing the skin. Your knife should glide through the tomato with very little pressure. If it doesn’t your knife is too blunt.

Before you even bother learning to sharpen your knife properly, you need to take a look at your knives. Are they even worth sharpening?

What to look for in a knife

A good knife will last you a lifetime – it’s an investment that will pay for itself over and over and over and with careful treatment it will be the best friend in the kitchen that you can ever have.

Firstly, there are lots of different types of knife to choose from, with different styles for different jobs. However, there are six main types of knife to choose from:

Chef’s Knife – available in different lengths, usually between 6 – 12 inches. This is the  workhorse of the kitchen and the traditional knife of choice of the professional chef.  

However, many chefs now favour the Santoku style – essentially a Japanese chef’s knife,  which offers a versatile (though less heavy-duty) alternative to the traditional chef’s  knife.

 

Paring Knife/Utility Knife – short, usually 3 – 4 inches. Lots of people seem to use this knife as their only knife in the home kitchen. They’re great for small, fine work such as peeling garlic, paring apples and so on but if you’re using a short knife like this to chop cabbage, root vegetables or slice meat then you’re making life very difficult for yourself.

Boning Knife – hard, solid blade with a thin point, very sharp edge. Great for getting inside a joint of meat, slicing through sinew and even bone; lousy for chopping veg or pretty much anything other than dealing with meat.

Flexible Filleting Knife – long, thin flexible blade for getting underneath a fish fillet. This is a great addition to the chef’s arsenal, but my no means essential to any home cook. Like the boning knife this is designed for a specific task: it’s not good for chopping hard veg – it lacks the power and weight of a chef’s knife.

Carving Knife – another specialist knife for carving joints of meat. To be honest, I’ve never owned a carving knife – my Santoku style knife can virtually take care of anything (except bone)

Bread Knife – this is a specialist knife which does one thing and one thing only, but that one thing it does very well and it can not really be replaced by another other style of knife ie if you’re ever going to cut bread you need a bread knife.

When starting out you only really THREE of these knives – a chef’s knife, a paring knife and a bread knife. The rest can wait until you’ve mastered your knife technique and until you want to learn how to do fiddly stuff like tunnel boning a leg of lamb or filleting place.

I’ve been really impressed with I.O. Shen knives www.ioshenonline.co.uk but you can also see the other knives I favour next to each category.

 

 

Minestrone Soup

Minestrone is a very simple soup that provides a good basic introduction to knife technique, balancing simple, robust flavours and both dried and fresh ingredients cooked well. As long as you concentrate on cooking – particularly on the pasta – it’s practically impossible to mess up. That’s what makes it such a great dish to start with on any cookery course!

There’s no set recipe for minestrone. In Italy, where Minestrone is eaten throughout the country, what goes in the pot varies both regionally and seasonally. It’s a dish that is as delicious as it is versatile and you can expect everything from peas and pesto to courgettes and pumpkin.

However, there are some common factors including beans, carrot, onion, stock, tomatoes and pasta. The foundation of the dish – and that of several other slow-cooked dishes – is known as the soffritto. Roughly translated, this means “sauté” and would in its most basic form mean gently fried onions and garlic. 

In this case I sauté onions, carrots and celery then add bacon (pancetta when I can get it, smoked streaky if I can’t) and garlic slightly later.

I like the mouthfeel of this version – small macaroni, small beans (haricot) and small slices of vegetable. Everything is cut to virtually the same size and it really makes a difference to the texture of the dish. 

Short cuts

This is such an easy dish there’s very little you can do to make it easier, but if you want to save time:

1. Use canned beans – I prefer not to as they don’t have the same toothsomeness as properly cooked dried beans

 

2. Buy stock – please don’t use a stock cube. They’re rubbish. 

If you only learn one thing… knife techniques

First up is the technique with the onion – see separate article here. This is the most efficient way to chop an onion. And when you get it down you can start to practice getting the dice smaller and smaller… until the pieces are so small they virtually disappear into the dish.

Secondly, use the opportunity of so much veg preparation to hone your knife technique. 

Ingredients

 

Tablespoon olive oil

2 medium carrots

2 celery sticks

1 large onion

4 slices smoked back bacon/pancetta

4 cloves garlic, sliced finely

125g haricot or cannellini beans, soaked overnight and cooked until tender but al dente

250g small shape pasta (gomitini, macaroni)

225 ml canned tomatoes

500 ml chicken stock

1 large courgette, diced

fresh basil

sea salt

 

black pepper 

Method

1. Chop the onions, carrot and celery (see picture)
2. Slice the bacon (or pancetta) into matchsticks
3. Cook these over a low to medium heat in the olive oil until soft
4. Add the tomatoes, chicken stock and garlic and cook slowly for around 5 – 10 mins, just to allow the tomatoes to break down
5. Add the pasta and cook as per instructions on the packet
6. Add the beans and courgettes 3 minutes before the pasta is ready
7. Remove the soup form the heat
8. Add fresh basil leaves – torn, not cut – and season to taste with salt and pepper

 

Serve with fresh parmesan cheese 

Troubleshooting

The sauté should be done on a fairly low heat so you hear the barest sizzle. Keep it slow and steady – you will want to cook the soffritto for around 10 – 15 minutes. If your pan is very noisy then it’s on too high; if the vegetables start to colour then it’s on too high.

Concentrate on getting both the beans and the pasta cooked just right – that means, al dente (which literally translates as “to the teeth”). The beans should be tender but still have some bite left in them while the pasta should be firm but cooked and resist when bitten into, without being too hard.

To get the cooking time just right you need to not only watch the recommended cooking times on the beans or pasta but also check regularly as to how the cooking is progressing.  

 

Alternatives

You can use almost anything in here – experiment with different types of pasta, different types of beans (canellini and borlotti are both good), and seasonal vegetables. That could be anything from creating a three-carb Atkins nightmare with potatoes to a light spring soup with peas, courgettes and green beans. 

Leftovers

This doesn’t go so well as leftovers or for freezing as the pasta and beans tend to go mushy. What you can do is make the basic soup (soffrito, tomatoes, stock) and then add beans and pasta to order.