— Afke Teunen

So this is actually a common question I get, um, because I do a lot of the grading for knife skills. Um, and it takes years and years of practice to be able to get your knife skills perfect, where you can actually make your cubes perfectly square and your Julian's and batine nets exactly perfect on each side and the length that you're desiring. There is actually a tool that, um, Mercer has that I recommend and I put a link for it down here, um, to a little stainless steel kind of ruler. Um, and you can click on the link here. Um, but if this little ruler basically has the small dice, the medium dice and the large dice kind of cut out of it, so you can literally put it right up to what you're cutting to make sure that it's getting accurate and it has the sizes for the Julian, um, and the batine nets as well on there too. So that's actually a really good way to be able to just kind of keep that in your cutting board when you're practicing, um, to be able to get it to the exact measurements you're looking for. Now this again, is for something, you know, if you're in a very high-end kitchen where it's something that's, you know, kind of demanded of you, but at a home cook it's not as important when we're talking about getting equal sized pieces for cooking. Um, generally equal sized pieces is okay when we're going up to that high, uh, the higher scale of fine dining, that's when you want all your cuts to be exactly precise. Um, and for our professional classes, uh, we are judging on those for our classes too. So I highly recommend getting one of those little rulers. They work very well. I use them in, um, courses all the time or when I'm teaching, um, live, just to be able to use, uh, as a representation and an easy guide for people. Um, I've also seen different cutting boards that have like ruler setups on them and different sizes on them, which is great to be able to do. So again, just remember lots of practice on them as well, so it's something that's going to take time. I still know people that have worked in restaurants for years and years that can't get their dice exactly perfect, but they're great cooks, you know, so, um, keep at it, just keep the practice going and definitely use, uh, a visual representation to help yourself.

Link for Stainless tool for knife cuts: