How To Chop Vegetables in Under 10 Minutes
Prep your favorite veggies for dinner with ease.
What’s the most dreaded cooking task that’s part of every meal you make? If you ask me, it’s chopping vegetables; the pieces need to be the same size for even cooking, and that’s tedious for experienced cooks and challenging for novices. Veggies like carrots, zucchini, cucumbers, and yellow squash typically require more chopping time due to their long shape. Luckily, you can remove the hassle by using this simple roll cutting technique.
The Benefits of Using a Roll Cut Technique
There are numerous cutting styles for vegetables, each of which produce pieces of various size. Finer cuts like brunoise and julienne take longer than courser cuts like macédoine. (That’s fancy for large dice.)
When you’re trying to get dinner on the table fast, you don’t want to spend a lot of time slicing and dicing. Roll cutting your veggies will speed up the process considerably. Roll cutting (also called oblique cut) creates larger, rustic chopped veggies, which are great for quick dinner options like stir-fry and grilled veggies.
“[Roll cutting veggies] creates more surface area for heat to penetrate so that food cooks faster,” writes Cook’s Illustrated. “For tapered vegetables, it allows you to fashion pieces that cook at the same rate, since the degree to which you angle the knife dictates how much surface area is exposed.”
Having plenty of surface area on a cut vegetable also means that it crisps up more once cooked. So, there’s no need to fuss about getting a perfect fine dice when you’re in a hurry. As long as you have a sharp knife and a clean cutting board, the roll cut method makes preparing veggies faster and easier.
How To Roll Cut Vegetables
Chef Ming Tsai demonstrates how to roll cut vegetables in a video posted on his YouTube channel. First, he peels a carrot and firmly places it on a cutting board. Next, he uses his knife to cut the carrot’s top before making diagonal cuts – rotating the veggie about 180 degrees after each slice.
The carrot is sliced in a matter of seconds, which gives chef Tsai enough time to do the same cutting technique on a zucchini and yellow squash. See how easy it is to roll cut vegetables in the clip below:
This speedy veggie chopping style will become your new go-to for weeknight dinners. Want to learn some more cutting hacks? Read our stories on how to chop vegetables with a pizza wheel and tricks for slicing stubborn produce! (Click through to learn how working more veggies into your daily diet can reduce your risk of glaucoma and cataracts.)
