How to Prepare Leeks

J. Kenji López-Alt MANAGING CULINARY DIRECTOR

The first step to great food is great knife skills. Check out more Knife Skills this way!

[Photographs and Video: Jessica Leibowitz of mycameraeatsfood.com]

Leeks are like the Lord Thistelwick Flanders of the onion family. The refined and aloof European cousin who needs to be nudged before his true onion character emerges. But once you start cooking with them, they offer a variety of characteristics that you don't find in regular onions.

First off, texture. When you cook down a regular onion, it becomes very soft, or it completely disintegrates. Leeks, on the other hand, retain a bit of tender bite, acquiring a pleasing texture more similar to that of, say, cooked cabbage. This property makes them fantastic whenever you want to add nice mild onion flavor without the stringiness or pulpiness of regular onions. Cooked very slowly in emulsified butter (often described on menus as "leek fondue"), they are incredible.

Flavorwise, they are far more mild than a regular onion, without the sweetness of a shallot. Slightly grassy and vegetal, they are known as the "soup onion" for a reason—they are great in soups and stews. Their flavor tends to sit back and support other flavors without overwhelming them.

How to Peel and Devein Shrimp

J. Kenji López-Alt MANAGING CULINARY DIRECTOR

The first step to great food is great knife skills. Check out more Knife Skills this way!

First things first: If you've been buying pre-cooked shrimp or even peeled and deveined shrimp, stop right this instant! I mean it!

Pre-cooked shrimp are unfailingly pre-overcooked-shrimp, and are impossible to add flavor to the way you can with raw shrimp. Shrimp that are raw but peeled and deveined are a small step up, but often get mangled and beat up in the cleaning. You are much better off buying whole, headless shrimp (or at the very least E-Z peel) and cleaning them yourself. It's a little more work, but worth the effort. This video will show you everything you need to know.

How to Clean Soft-Shell Crabs

Daniel Gritzer CULINARY DIRECTOR

The first step to great food is great knife skills. Check out more Knife Skills this way!

Pity the feisty blue crab. Even its binomial name, callinectes sapidus (savory beautiful swimmer), spells its fate. Hard shells and skin-splitting pincers aren't enough to stop us humans from throwing a bunch of them in a pot with Old Bay, then messily picking them to shreds in search of morsels of sweet, tasty meat.

Pity even more the soft-shell blue crab, which has shed its protective shell during the growing months of roughly May through September, so that it can form a new, larger one. Not only is the soft-shell defenseless, with its limp claws and squishy carapace, but it's also irresistibly easy to eat, requiring nothing more than a quick cleaning of a few inedible parts to prepare it for cooking and eating whole.

Pity, also, the cook, who has to slaughter the soft-shell crab in what feels like the most brutal way possible: by cutting off its face, ripping free its abdomen, and tearing out its lungs (technically, gills, but I'm anthropomorphizing here). Some will object to this on ethical grounds, others will choose to have their fishmonger do it for them, but for those of us who like our shellfish alive until the last moment—which should be all of us—here are the basic steps to get them ready for the frying pan.

How to Slice Chicken Breast for Stir-Fries

J. Kenji López-Alt MANAGING CULINARY DIRECTOR

The first step to great food is great knife skills. Check out more Knife Skills this way!

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Even if you have the very best chef's knife and that knife is carefully sharpened andhoned after each use, chicken can still be a bit slippery to slice. Throw it on a plate and place it in the freezer for about 15 minutes to help it firm up.

All muscle matter has a grain to it. The muscle fibers align in the direction that they contract. The orientation of your knife to this grain will determine the length of the muscle fibers in an individual slice of meat, which in turn will have a profound effecton how tender or tough that meat is.

How to Debone a Chicken Thigh

J. Kenji López-Alt MANAGING CULINARY DIRECTOR

The first step to great food is great knife skills. Check out more Knife Skills this way!

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Recipes often call for boneless skinless chicken thighs, yet finding them in supermarkets can be a bit of a hassle. You're far more likely to find bone-in thighs or even whole legs. Knowing how to take that bone out yourself will save you some hassle and provide you with some good bones for making stock in the process.

I've tried dozens of methods of boning chicken thighs. As it turns out, the easiest is also the one that provides the best yield, scraping every last bit of meat from the bone. Here's how you do it.

Step 1: Locate the Joint

If you're starting with whole chicken legs, you'll have to remove the drumstick from the thigh. Place your thumb over the joint and move the thigh bone back and forth with your other hand to find the articulation point. This is where you'll cut.

How to Cut Mushrooms

J. Kenji López-Alt MANAGING CULINARY DIRECTOR

The first step to great food is great knife skills. Check out more Knife Skills this way!

Have you ever tried to make a mushroom out of George Washington's head on a dollar bill?

Well, we're not going to do that today, nor are we going to do the opposite, which is significantly more difficult (and altogether more impressive). Instead, we're going to learn how to cut button mushrooms into two basic shapes, which for most practical purposes, is all you need*.

*With the exception of finely chopped mushrooms for stuffings, meatballs, or duxelles, which you should be making in your food processor anyway.

Quartered mushrooms are great for tossing with a bit of olive oil and salt and roasting in the oven. They cook down and brown while still retaining enough moisture that their tenderness and meaty quality is preserved. They are also great sauteed, though it does take some time for the copious amounts of water they release to evaporate before they start with any kind of browning.

If you want a quick cooking shape that'll brown relatively fast and work its way into sauces or soups nicely, sliced mushrooms are what you're looking for.

No matter what shape you want, the key is to first trim off the stem of your shrooms. This not only removes any woody, dried out, or dirty sections, but more importantly it also creates a flat base for your mushroom to rest on, making slicing much easier and safer. See the video for full instructions.

Shopping and Storage

look for ones that don't have any grayish-brown spots on their caps that can mark decay.

While the method above is demonstrated with button mushrooms, it'll work equally well with cremini. When shopping for mushrooms,look for ones that don't have any grayish-brown spots on their caps that can mark decay.Examine the moist area near the gills under the cap as well, as it'll often start to turn before the rest of the shroom. The bottom of the stem can be a little discolored, but should not be overly dry, mushy, or starting to shred apart.

How to Prepare, Peel, and Cut Butternut Squash

Daniel Gritzer CULINARY DIRECTOR

With the right tools, preparing butternut squash is easy. [Photographs: Daniel Gritzer]

The first step to great food is great knife skills. Check out more Knife Skills this way!

For some, the start of football and hockey season marks the transition from summer to fall. For me, it's the butternut squash I've taken home from the market. Of all the winter squashes, butternut is one of the most common and also one of the most versatile. It's firm enough to hold its shape in some dishes, yet purees beautifully in others. It has enough sweetness and flavor to be very appealing, but not so much that it tastes like dessert.

I had some fun playing with butternut squash for the pressure-cooker risotto recipe I developed recently, but cutting it up into all different sizes reminded me that its firmness and odd shape can make it a more difficult vegetable to prepare than many others.

Shopping and Storage

Because they're hard to the touch and covered in a thick, durable skin, the art of gauging the ripeness of a butternut squash comes down to some subtle clues. First, you want to pick squash that are free of any punctures or surface wounds, since a compromised skin can lead to rotten spots pretty quickly. Beyond that, look for squash that feel heavy for their size, and avoid any that have a greenish cast to their beige skin.