An illustrated, practical guide to everything you need to know about using knives in the kitchen. As the number of gourmet home kitchens burgeons, so does the number of home cooks who want to become proficient users of the professional-caliber equipment they own. And of all kitchen skills, perhaps the most critical are those involving the proper use of knives. Norman Weinstein has been teaching his knife skills workshop at New York City’s Institute of Culinary Education for more than a decade—and his classes always sell out. That’s because Weinstein focuses so squarely on the needs of the nonprofessional cook, providing basic instruction in knife techniques that maximize efficiency while placing the least possible stress on the user’s arm. Now, Mastering Knife Skills brings Weinstein’s well-honed knowledge to home cooks everywhere. Whether you want to dice an onion with the speed and dexterity of a TV chef, carve a roast like an expert, bone a chicken quickly and neatly, or just learn how to hold a knife in the right way, Mastering Knife Skills will be your go-to manual. Each cutting, slicing, and chopping method is thoroughly explained—and illustrated with clear, step-by-step photographs. Extras include information on knife construction, knife makers and types, knife maintenance and safety, and cutting boards. “In the old days, when kitchens weren’t equipped with a lot of fancy gadgets, a skilled chef needed only one tool to ply his trade: a sharp knife. This book will introduce novice cooks to and reacquaint experienced chefs with everything they need to know about a good knife and the art of using it.” —Cecilia Chiang, James Beard Award–winning restaurateur and author of The Seventh Daughter “This beautifully illustrated book, written with passion and precision, minces no words in guiding the reader to choose, maintain, and use a knife. Indispensable for anyone who prepares food, it has taught me how to cut produce much more efficiently.” —David Karp, Fruit Detective

Good knife skills can be the most important ingredient in preparing a dish. Mastering professional knife skills makes a cook not only faster but safer as well. Kitchen Knife Skills shows the home cook how to choose and care for knives, how to keep them sharp and how to make the best use of their most important features. This comprehensive guide details the standard professional techniques used by chefs the world over, allowing the home cook to work just like the professionals -- quickly, effectively and stylishly. Detailed, step-by-step photos and instructions show how to prepare anything in the kitchen, including: -Vegetables -Fruits -Herbs -Poultry and meat -Fish -Bread and cakes From filleting a fish to fanning a piece of fruit, every knife and knife skill is described in detail in this outstanding resource book. Using this guide, anyone can cook like a professional chef.

Describes skills needed for using a knife for both right- and left-handed people.

Anyone who wants to cook-- either professionally or at home-- needs to know how to use a knife. Holding and using knives correctly will not only help you work more safely, but also enable you to work faster, making you much more efficient in the kitchen.

From the owners of Berkeley's famed Kitchen on Fire! cooking school comes an illustrated, step-by-step guide to becoming an excellent home chef.

Good knife skills are key to feeling confident and comfortable in the kitchen. Chef Bill Collins teaches you how to wield cooking knives properly, so you can slice, peel, bone, and dice with ease. Illustrated step-by-step instructions show you how to cut and carve seafood, poultry, meats, and produce of all kinds. In addition to profiling the best uses for a variety of knife types, Collins includes tips for using other sharp kitchen tools like graters, vegetable peelers, and mandolins. Get ready to chop away!

Why are most of us so woefully uninformed about our kitchen knives? We are intimidated by our knives when they are sharp, annoyed by them when they are dull, and quietly ashamed that we don't know how to use them with any competence. For a species that has been using knives for nearly as long as we have been walking upright, that's a serious problem. An Edge in the Kitchen is the solution, an intelligent and delightful debunking of the mysteries of kitchen knives once and for all. If you can stack blocks, you can cut restaurant-quality diced vegetables. If you can fold a paper airplane, you can sharpen your knives better than many professionals. Veteran cook Chad Ward provides an in-depth guide to the most important tool in the kitchen, including how to choose the best kitchen knives in your price range, practical tutorials on knife skills, a step-by-step section on sharpening, and more——all illustrated with beautiful photographs throughout. Along the way you will discover what a cow sword is, and why you might want one; why chefs are abandoning their heavy knives in droves; and why the Pinch and the Claw, strange as they may sound, are in fact the best way to make precision vegetable cuts with speed and style. An Edge in the Kitchen is the one and only guide to the most important tool in the kitchen.

Sales of Japanese kitchen knives are booming in the U.S. But how many people have the skills to use these superbly-crafted tools to full advantage? Now, internationally renowned chef Hiromitsu Nozaki shares his expertise and insights in a book that will help anyone who owns a Japanese knife to maximize its performance. In Japanese Kitchen Knives, Nozaki teaches the reader how to use usuba, deba and yanagiba, the three main traditional Japanese knives. He explains many essential techniques, such as the importance of understanding blade angle and point of force, and illustrates these lessons by working with ingredients familiar to western readers, like carrots and rainbow trout. Color photos and Nozaki’s commentary further clarify the process, and the pictures are taken from the chef’s perspective for easier understanding (most other books take photos from the reverse perspective). Each technique is accompanied by recipes that require its use, and all recipes are very simple, using easy-to-acquire ingredients. Other sections include a look at artisanal Japanese knife — making and information on sharpening, storing and identifying the variety of Japanese knives. Specialty knives are shown on location, from the unique unagi eel knife in an unagi specialty restaurant to the colossal tuna filleting knife in Tsukiji fish market.

In 1827, James Bowie carved his way into American history at the Sandbar Fight, and soon every fighting man of the South and West had to have a knife like his. The bowie knife could cut like a razor, chop like a cleaver, and stab like a sword, and many considered it deadlier than a pistol at close range. So great was the dread it inspired that by 1838 it was banned in several states—a ban that did little to stanch the flow of blood. Bowie's story is well known, but what of the other cutters and stabbers of his day? Gunfighters have long been celebrated, but those who fought with the bowie knife have been largely ignored—until now. Unearthing accounts from memoirs, court records, regional histories, and newspaper archives, Paul Kirchner, author of the Paladin bestsellers The Deadliest Men and More of the Deadliest Men Who Ever Lived , presents their stories for the first time in Bowie Knife Fights, Fighters, and Fighting Techniques. Kirchner identifies and profiles the four greatest bowie knife fighters of history, as well as numerous other wielders of the blade. He details the weapon's use in the Texas War of Independence, the Mormon exodus, the Mexican War, the slave system, the Gold Rush, Bleeding Kansas, the Civil War, the Lincoln assassination, the Indian Wars, and the Western frontier. The book describes bowie knife fighting tricks and techniques and provides numerous accounts of knife-against-knife and knife-against-gun encounters. Its final chapter surveys the continued use of the bowie and other fighting knives in modern warfare.

Building upon Timothy Ferriss's internationally successful "4-hour" franchise, The 4-Hour Chef transforms the way we cook, eat, and learn. Featuring recipes and cooking tricks from world-renowned chefs, and interspersed with the radically counterintuitive advice Ferriss's fans have come to expect, The 4-Hour Chef is a practical but unusual guide to mastering food and cooking, whether you are a seasoned pro or a blank-slate novice.