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.

The 4 Knife Cuts Every Cook Should Know

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: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Learning how to cut properly can make the difference between seeing kitchen work as a chore and a joy. It can mean the difference between unevenly cooked dishes and poor flavor development, and excellence. There's a good reason why the very first class any culinary student takes and the very first job any starting cook has in the kitchen is knife work. Cooking without mastering these basic strokes is like trying to run without knowing how to tie your shoes. These are the four strokes everybody should know.

Here's what we're gonna cover:

• The Slice
• The Chop
• The Back-Slice
• The Rock-Chop

Depending on the type of knife you use, you may find yourself using some more than others—slicing and the rock chop are used mostly with Western-style curved blades, while chopping and back-slicing are more common for straighter santoku-style knives—but all are good to have in your arsenal.

If you're a total beginner in the kitchen, you might want to take a quick look at our guide on how to properly hold a knife. In fact, if you don't know what a blade grip, a bolster, and the claw are, you may want a quick refresher anyway!

Cut #1: The Slice

What it's used for: Slicing large vegetables and meats, or rough-slicing herbs with a Western-style chef's knife.

How to do it: Create a flat, stable surface for your food to rest on by slicing it in half or slicing off a thin section of its face. Hold the food steady with your non-knife hand, curling your fingers into a claw and tucking your knuckles underneath.

Hold the tip of the blade against the cutting board with the knife angled upwards, the flat side resting against your knuckles.

With the tip of the blade in constant contact with the cutting board, pull the knife backwards slightly until the blade slices into the food.

How To Trim Skirt Steaks

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]

Unless I'm going for a big, juicy, dry-aged ribeye, the skirt steak is my favorite cut for grilling. It's got a loose texture with a distinct grain and big, buttery swaths of fat that run through it, keeping it nice and moist as it cooks. And while it's no longer necessarily dirt cheap at the supermarket, it's also a cut that comes out juicy and flavorful even when you don't spring for the extra-fatty prime-graded stuff, which can help keep a few bucks in your wallet. At my local supermarket, it runs around half the price-per-pound of a prime ribeye steak—a bargain in my book.

As with any inexpensive steak, the key to success starts in trimming it properly to maximize flavor and tenderness. Here's how to do it.

Selecting and Shopping

The outside skirt is the diaphragm muscle of the cow, cut from the plate, and it comes with a tough membrane attached to it, which needs to be trimmed before it can be cooked. Fortunately (or unfortunately) for us, the outside skirt is sold almost exclusively to restaurants, leaving us with the slightly less favorable but far easier to trim inside skirt.

How to Cut Citrus Fruit Into Wedges, Slices, and Suprèmes

J. Kenji López-Alt MANAGING CULINARY DIRECTOR

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

How to cut citrus slices, wedges, and suprèmes. [Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

This week we're gonna show you how to cut citrus fruits into slices (rounds), wedges, and suprèmes (aka fancy-pants segments). Seems like simple stuff, right? And it is, but doing it right can make a world of difference in how your finished dishes look andtaste.

When shopping, look for fruit that seems heavy for its size. Most ripe citrus fruit should give quite a bit when squeezed. If too firm, leave it on the shelf and move on. Citrus fruit will get softer as it sits at home, but don't expect a sour orange to become sweeter. Once it's been picked, it's about as sweet as it's gonna be.

Ripe citrus fruit can be stored for around two weeks in the crisper drawer in your fridge or in an open bowl on the counter if your home is relatively cool. Once cut open, store citrus in the refrigerator in a sealed container for up to five days.

Citrus Slices (Rounds)

One of my very first restaurant jobs, back when I worked at a Mongolian grill-style joint in Cambridge (yes, I was a spatula-wielding Knight of the Round Grill), was cutting oranges into thin rounds for the bar. I got through about a half case of them before the chef, a large, scarred Colombian who preferred to wear those skinny, button-up dishwasher's shirts so he could show off his tattoos, came by and chucked them in the garbage.

Should You Cook Your Turkey in Parts?

Aaron Mattis

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

Have you ever sat down for Thanksgiving dinner, assembled your plate, taken a bite, and thought, This turkey is okay, but it's just too moist and evenly cooked? Me neither. Let me make a prediction: You will never have that reaction to a traditional roast turkey.

Here's the problem with turkey: above 145°F or so, white meat begins to dry out. Dark meat, with its connective tissue, on the other hand, has to be cooked to at least 165°F.How do you cook a single bird to two different temperatures? It's difficult at best, and downright impossible at worst, even more so when you consider the variation in shape and thickness of turkey meat, especially on the breast of a large bird.

Separating the dark meat from the white is the only way to nail the 20-degree temperature differential between properly cooked thighs and breasts. As a delicious added plus, separated legs can be slow-cooked to break down their connective tissue and provide a wonderfully silky mouthfeel.

How To Prepare Chicken Paillards

J. Kenji López-Alt MANAGING CULINARY DIRECTOR

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

[Video: Robyn Lee and J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

A chicken paillard is just a fancy French way of describing pounded chicken cutlets. As a technique for home cooks, it's one of the most useful; Once you know how to do it, a hot chicken dinner is only a few minutes away. When pounded to a quarter inch, chicken breast takes about four minutes total to cook in a hot skillet.

Once the chicken is cooked, throw a splash of wine into the pot with a knob of butter, put everything on a plate with a nice green salad on the side, and you've just saved yourself $13.99 on an entrée.

The most difficult step is the cutting: It requires a sharp knife and a little practice. If you're still a little green in the kitchen, you'll probably make a few holes in your chicken breasts before you get the hang of it—no worries, they'll still taste just as good.

How to Shuck an Oyster

J. Kenji López-Alt MANAGING CULINARY DIRECTOR

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

Some great couples are just ill-fated from the get go. Take warm summer evenings and perfectly plump, ice-cold oysters for example. A match made in heaven right? Except that oysters are unfortunately at their worst in the summer.

Then again, even a thin, summer oyster is still a thing of beauty. Cold and briny with the fresh, salty-air scent of the ocean, they are the only animal commonly consumed live in the Western world. Paired with an ice-cold beer, or a crisp, dry white wine or Champagne, they are the perfect hors d'oeuvre or appetizer. The key is knowing how to select them, and how to open them. You'll definitely need an oyster knife, a special dull-pointed, thick-bladed knife that is used to pry the back hinge open and separate the body from the shell. Watch the video for full details.

Besides being outright delicious, oysters are among the healthiest things you can eat, both for yourself, and for the environment. Unlike fish farms, which produce tons of dangerous waste and require inefficient feeds and medicines, oyster farms have minimal environmental impact, actually cleaning the water that they are farmed in. Double win!

Shopping and Storage

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

Oysters in the shell must by law be sold live. When buying them, they should be clamped tightly shut. If they are open at all and don't close immediately when tapped, they are dead and should be avoided. Smell the oysters, too. If there is any kind of fishy aroma, avoid them. Fresh live oysters should smell like a sea breeze.When buying oysters, ensure that they are being stored cup-side-down in the store, and that they are well-chilled—on crushed ice is ideal.

How to Remove Pomegranate Seeds

J. Kenji López-Alt MANAGING CULINARY DIRECTOR

                                                   [Video: Jessica Leibowitz of My Camera Eats Food]

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

It's pomegranate season, and yeah, picking out pomegranate seeds one at a time and popping them in your mouth might be a really zen way to enjoy a delicious snack, but some times you just want to shoot them back like a load of antioxidant-rich Lifesaver's holes, right?

For times like those, you'll want to get them all out of the shell as quickly and neatly as possible, and the blood-red juice has a habit of staining fingers pink. Well this video will show you an easy method to take advantage of the relative densities of the seeds and pith to separate the two as painlessly and stainlessly as possible.

Shopping and Storage

This time of year, you can find pomegranates almost anywhere, and to be honest, most of them will be good. As with most fruit, feel your way around and go for the ones that seem the heaviest for their size—these'll be the juiciest. Pomegranates should be firm and dense, and make a slightly hollow sound when you flick them with your fingernail. The flower end should be tight with no signs of drying out or decay.

How to Prepare Fennel

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]

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

Fennel is a generally divisive vegetable. Crisp, with a distinct anise flavor, it can be overpowering for some people. I like my fennel in small doses. Sliced super thin on a mandoline and tossed with citrus segments and a nice lemony vinaigrette, it's a great winter salad that goes well with sausages, terrines, and other charcuterie. Just after we shot this video, we threw the sliced fennel together with the pomegranate we'd just seeded and tossed it all with olive oil and vinegar. Delicious.

How to Prepare Belgian Endives

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

[Video: Jessica Leibowitz]

Endive comes in a few varieties. Curly endive, known as frisée in France and often called chicory in the U.S., has tightly bunched, frizzy leaves. Generally, only the tender yellow and pale green leaves from the center are eaten as a salad green (try some with duck confit or a poached egg—or both), and they can sometimes be tough to come across in a normal supermarket. Belgian endives are far more readily available in the States. Pale yellow with an elongated bulbous shape, they are made up of a series of tightly overlapping leaves.

The individual leaves are crunchy and slightly bitter, and make a good addition to a crudité platter. They go particularly well with creamy dressings and dips.

You can also slice the leaves in either direction to form the base of a salad. My favorite way to eat them is with a slightly sweet, nut-based vinaigrette, like my Toasted Almond Vinaigrette.

They also have quite a few cooked applications—you can braise endives whole in stock or milk, for example, or sautée the leaves and purée them into a soup. Try the leaves as a pizza topping too. They sweeten up like radicchio as they char.

How to Prepare Portabella Mushrooms

J. Kenji López-Alt  Culinary MANAGING DIRECTOR

The first step to great Knife Skills Food is great. Check out More Knife Skills this Way! 

[ Video: Jessica Leibowitz ]

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

Whether you spell it portabella, portobello, or portobella, nobody can tell you you're wrong Here's another place you can be right :. When you tell someone that portabella, white mushrooms, button mushrooms, champignon mushrooms, and crimini are all actually the Same fungus. The Difference in color on the white cap and crimini BETWEEN Comes down to the specific Strain of Agaricus bisporus Cultivated THEY're from, while a portabella is simply a mature Version of the Same fungus.  

Vegetarians seem to love them because of their meaty texture and convenient burger-bun size. I like them because they taste good. Whether you plan on stuffing and roasting them, grilling them whole, or-my faorite way-slicing them thinly and sautéeing them until they're deep brown and deglazing with some soy sauce, stock, and butter to form the base of an awesome steak sauce, you need to start by cleaning them.

How to Cut a Pineapple Like a Badass

J. Kenji López-Alt MANAGING CULINARY DIRECTOR

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

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

I remember the first time I saw one of the Salvadoran prep cooks at a restaurant where I worked slice up a pineapple for us to eat as a cool snack on a particularly hot night. The pineapple was great, but the truly awesome part was the way in which she prepared it. Up until then, I was of the just hack away until it looks like I can eat it school; as a consequence, I ended up throwing a lot of edible bits into the trash along with the skin.

Her method, which I've since seen everywhere from the streets of Cartagena to the streets of Bangkok, was to remove the dark, spiny eyes with a series of shallow, diagonal, wedge-shaped cuts. It takes a bit of practice before you can do it efficiently (I'm still nowhere near as fast as she was!), but the reward is a much higher yield of pineapple (read: fewer sweet edible bits in the compost), and the ability to look badass and inspire badassery in anyone who sees you do it.

How To Peel Pearl Onions

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

To be honest, pearl onions are available pretty much year-round at the same quality level, but they're especially useful in winter when other vegetables aren't in their prime. Available in white, yellow, or red (just like their full-sized brethren!), they are generally milder than full-sized onions and take on a noticeable sweetness when cooked.

My favorite way to prepare them is to slowly cook them down in butter until they're deeply browned and sweet. They also go great in stews and braises, like a good coq au vin. The only annoying part is that it takes an awful lot of work to clean something that gets eaten in a single bite.

Here's a little trick to help you remove the skin easily with your fingers by blanching the onions first. Watch the video for full instructions.

P.S. Peeling pearl onions isn't too hard, especially with this trick, but here's a little secret: frozen peeled pearl onions work really well for almost all applications. I often buy them when feeling a bit lazy. shh.

How To Break Down A Chicken

J. Kenji López-Alt  Culinary MANAGING DIRECTOR

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

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

[Video:  Jessica Leibowitz ]

If you've Been Following Knife Skills, May you be thinking, "Wait a minute, WE've  Seen All this before! "And you're right. BUT WE've Upgraded Technology this time and put it in video. Enjoy!

If there's one knife skill that can save you money and make you look cool at the same time, it's breaking down a chicken. Consider that boneless breasts often cost around three times more than whole chicken does.

So for the same price as a two-pack of breasts, you can buy a whole chicken, which comes with those same breasts, plus two legs, and a back. And wait for it-if you're really lucky, you'll get a free liver, Heart, and gizzard thrown in to Sweeten the Deal! I know girls (named  Chichi ) who'd get the Whole Chicken just to get HER Hands on Some of Those Delicious gizzards!

How to Cut Apples For Pies

J. Kenji López-Alt MANAGING CULINARY DIRECTOR

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

Slicing a whole bunch of apples for a pie can be a chore, and those push-down-and-pop-out apple corer/slicer combos never seem to work right, producing fat wedges that don't sit right in the pie plate. If you're awesome with a paring knife, you can use the Jacques Pepin technique: twirl the knife around the top then the bottom, split it in half, cut out the seeds, and slice the wedges, all without ever letting the apple leave your hand. For the rest of us, here's the easiest, most consistent technique I've found.

It does produce a bit of waste around the very central core of the apple, but I feel that the time saved and convenience of the method is a reasonable trade-off. Plus I have a hamster I can feed those extra bits to.

How to Slice Scallions

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

When used as a base ingredient in a stir-fry or salsa, a fine rough chop will do you just fine. But the beauty of scallions is that they're as pretty as they are flavorful—provided you know how to cut them.

Here are the basic knife skills you'll need to produce three different types of garnish-worthy scallion slices.

Basic Slices

Scallions, like other delicate vegetables and herbs, should be cut using a slicing motion as opposed to chopping. When you chop, you move your knife up and down with very little horizontal motion. This can cause crushing or bruising. Slicing using the full length of the blade and minimal downward pressure creates the cleanest cuts.

Here's a good rule of thumb: the more you can hear yourself slicing, the more you're crushing those poor scallions. A good, clean slice with a sharp knife should be nearly silent.

The Serious Eats Guide to Carving Turkey

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

So you've followed one of our turkey recipes and have the golden beast in front of you. Now what? For many folks, the hardest part of cooking a turkey is carving and serving it. Depending on how you roasted the bird, the carving instructions will be a little different.