It's How You Cut It

Growing up my mother and I would make homemade pasta on a regular basis. Sometimes we used a small hand cranked tabletop machine and other times we rolled out the dough using an unusually large rolling pin and cut strips of fettuccine noodles with a knife. The hand rolled and cut version always tasted better--though I didn’t know why. Nor did I understand why tearing fresh herbs always seem more flavorful than cutting them or for that matter why splitting an English muffin with my fingers tasted better than when I cut it open with a knife. I do now.

I’ve come to understand that it’s the imperfections that make all the difference: butter gets stuck in the nooks of the English muffin, tears in herbs release the flavor more intensely and pasta tastes better when it’s naturally uneven and its thickness is irregular.

How something is cut is of great importance in food preparation and the success of any dish. Anyone who has ever bit into a large slice of a sun dried tomato will immediately know that it’s far too intense--a little sliver is all you need. The opposite is true for mushrooms--cut them too small and they disappear. How something is cut is especially important with pasta. This is why we have so many varieties. Matching the right pasta with the right sauce is an art that makes or breaks a dish. Serve a dish of angel hair with a heavy alfredo sauce and it will soon look and taste like one big lump, or rigatoni with an oil and garlic sauce will taste like you’re eating oily starch. Serve angel hair with a sauté of fresh chopped grape or cherry tomatoes and torn pieces of just picked basil and you’ll think you are eating the food of the angels.

As a professional chef I’ve come to understand more and more that how something is cut makes a huge difference. Most of the time, the decision on how I want a particular ingredient cut is a thought out process---which is why any good recipe will specify this. At other times I find this out by pure instinct--as is the case with my chicken salad. I tear it instead of dicing or cutting it in any way. This will produce the same imperfections that make tearing an English muffin so good. Try it and you won’t believe what an amazing difference this small change will make. The other day, even my kitchen adverse daughter noticed this when she brought home some chicken salad from Whole Foods that was torn. She was so excited to have more that we walked over 14 New York City blocks (in high heels) just get some--funny that she didn’t take notice when I instructed her to do this years ago, hut one taste did the trick!

So let’s celebrate the imperfections in everything and realize that it’s these very “flaws” that makes all the wonderful, delicious difference.