Knowledge Base > Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

Dan Marek - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

This event was on Tuesday, February 28, 2023 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern

Join Chef Dan Marek in his virtual office as he welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to Ask Anything – from cooking techniques to cours… Read More.

Recorded

Question:

When a recipe says to dice, are they referring to the smallest dice cut or does it matter?

— YVONNE TETREAULT

Answer:

That's a great question. And the more you do these exercises the more they're going to feel comfortable if you're doing them correctly. So you're talking about the way you're holding your knife. That's a good thing to be able to kind of start with. So I'm just looking for something. I can hold in my hand to show as an example, but I use my glasses case here. So Let's just pretend that this was a knife. I'm gonna hold it by the end and I want to wrap one finger around and then put my thumb on the other side of that basically and then I'm going to rock my knife basically like that. So I have my hand. It's like I have the blade between my thumb and forefinger and then the handle is pretend. It's right there between there so that way I'm actually going up and down you want to make sure not to have like your finger on top of the blade like this but it's kind of pinching the blade in each side then holding the handle kind of like that. You'll be able to rock up and down. Sorry, maybe someone with glasses case for it, but it's hand here to make that happen. So starting with that is a really good place to start and definitely check out the nice skills videos. We have it's a good good, you know just for good basics of kind of starting where you're at with just holding your knife. Now as far as dice is go it's really funny because when people just people use the term dice generally and I mean historically dice is the the size of an actual dice, right so, you know a small This is about a quarter inch by a quarter inch thick, you know, like that would be something for like a super mere paw and like a salsa a medium dice is about a half inch by a half inch which is good for stews and a large dice is about a three-quarter inch by three quarter inch which you might like roast, you know vegetables that you know, so it's kind of a larger dice, but that's kind of your different sizes of those now, we have different charts on those different sizes as well other different size for julienne bluma other sizes of those two but dice is a term. That's kind of used very Sporadically right like so when we say a dice it's they're like, it's usually a specific size for something for that. But if you're doing home cooking stuff, you know it dice is basically it depends on what you're making. Like if you're making like a salsa or something where you know, you're just gonna have the ingredient just at the same size. You want to make sure that just fits on your spoon your fork well enough to be able to get that ingredient plus a couple others, whereas the larger diocese, you know, the three quarter by three quarter inch or something like that and you know, that would be used for something like roasting vegetables. So part of that is just you know, knowing what the product is going to be in to be able to get the right size for you as a home cook and just keeping that in mind.
Dan Marek

Dan Marek

Director of Plant-Based Culinary & Dev

rouxbe.com