January 14th, 2025 
Last post showed how to make Instant 5-Ingredient Salad Dressing that required no kitchen knife skills. Starting with the next post, 5-Ingredient Salad Dressing with Fresh Garlic, knife skills will become important. We’ll start slowly and deliberately, and I’ll help you with pictures, because knowing how to handle a knife safely in the kitchen – and I’ve sure taken my cuts…
…is the THE most important kitchen skill to have.
There are 2 keys to kitchen knife safety: keeping knife blades sharp and using curled fingers to hold food in place while cutting.
First, why keep knives sharp? Because a dull knife is the most dangerous kitchen tool. The reason is that you have to apply more pressure to a dull knife to make it cut into whatever it is that you want to cut, as shown in the left picture below. That added pressure increases the likelihood of that knife slipping off what you’re cutting into your food gripping hand. A sharp knife, however, sets an edge into what you’re cutting precisely and with less pressure and is therefore less likely to cause self-injury.
The 3 easiest ways to sharpen a knife are with a sharpening steel (notice that I’m sliding the sharp edge of the knife blade away from me, not toward me, in the picture below), electric knife sharpener and handheld sharpener. I do not include knife sharpening with a sharpening stone, or whetstone, here because that technique, though excellent, is more complicated and time consuming.
Click this link or the picture below to download your choice of knife sharpening technique.
There’s one more quick, last resort variation on the sharpening steel technique, which uses the squared back of one knife to sharpen a dull knife, as shown below. I’ll put together picture book directions soon and will post them here.
Finally, but equally importantly regarding kitchen knife safety, if you’ve downloaded recipes from the Gotta-Eat site that require any cutting with a knife, you’ve probably noticed that my fingers on the hand holding what I’m cutting to the cutting board are always curled as shown here.
The reason I do this is not to make me look like a chef – I’m not. I only do it to keep my fingers from getting in the way of the knife blade. Curling your fingers does two things: it gives you the firmest, best anchoring grip on the whatever you’re cutting and also allows your knuckles to work as a knife guide whether you’re using a fat bladed (chef’s) knife as shown above or a short bladed (paring) knife as shown below.
If you’re new to this curled finger technique, try it a few times and start slowly. Use both your hands as a unit as you cut from right to left if you’re right handed like me or left to right if you’re left handed. Once you feel comfortable curling your food-gripping fingers and using your hands as a unit deliberately and slowly, you can ramp up the speed. In no time at all, curling your fingers and moving your hands together while you cut will become a habit – a darned good habit!
Next post: we’ll put this knife skill to use when we make 5-Ingredient Salad Dressing with Fresh Garlic.
