How To Dice Hard Boiled Eggs

Have you ever seen hard boiled eggs diced into those perfect little cubes and wondered how they did that? It's really easy to do as long as you have a wire egg slicer. I'm generally not a fan of single-purpose gadgets in the kitchen, but this one makes the cut.

Start by cutting perpendicular to the long axis, the way you would if you were just going to do slices.



Holding everything together, turn the egg a quarter turn and slice again.



One more quarter turn -- it's going to be really hard to hold it all together now.



And that's it.

How To Mince Garlic

In case you didn't already know, the smaller you chop garlic the stronger the taste will be. When you cut or smash the cell walls, you're releasing the oils that carry the flavor. If you want to go a little milder than you get with smashed or pressed garlic, or if you just hate cleaning the garlic press, you'll need to learn how to mince.

As a bonus, this is also a good technique for using cloves that are actually a little past their prime. It's better, of course, to get something perfectly fresh, but if you've already started on dinner when you discover your garlic has started to sprout, this can be a real time saver.

Note in the two cloves below that they're starting to put out green shoots.



These shoots can be very bitter if you include them. They also don't smash the same way the rest of the clove does, and they'll get stuck in a press. Luckily, if you remember that garlic is a plant bulb, you'll see how to fix it. Start by cutting off the base of the clove.



You have to do this even if they haven't sprouted. Next cut the cloves in half lengthwise.



This is what you couldn't see before slicing, and it's what would jam up a garlic press. Pry out the center part with the back of your thumbnail or the tip of a paring knife.



Now that you've got the green out, put the flat side down and hold two or three pieces together on the cutting board.1



Don't worry at first about trying to go fast like you see the chefs do on TV. Just do nice thin slices along the long side.



Once they're sliced, turn them sideways and go across the other direction.



Presto, minced garlic.

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1. A note on cutting boards. Plastic and glass cutting boards look nice and clean up easy, but they're really hard on the edge of your knife. Use wood if you have a choice. You don't want to mince garlic with a dull knife.

Making mirepoix

Mirepoix is a simple combination of onion, celery and carrot sautéed together. It is so common in French cooking that recipes will sometimes call for a certain amount of mirepoix, instead of listing the three vegetables separately.

When you do see recipes for the mirepoix, it is typically either two parts celery to one part each of onion and carrot, or equal parts each. I have found that you don't have to be really precise with this. As long as there's enough of each that you get all three flavors, and you dice everything about the same size, you'll be good.

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Ingredients

1 medium onion -- the size of your fist
6-10 carrots -- as big as your thumb at the base
2-3 celery stalks

Directions

It's best to do this as mise en place. That's just French for "set in place" -- meaning get everything prepped and set out all at once before you start actually cooking. Set out three bowls before you start chopping.

First dice the onion.

Then do the celery. The bottom inch or so will be bright white, and quite possibly not looking very good.



That's okay, since we're going to cut the whole bottom off anyway.



Unlike onion, which grows underground but is completely clean after peeling the outside, celery grows aboveground and manages to accumulate lots of dirt in the bottom of the bunch.



Separate all the stalks and clean well with cold water. If it's exceptionally dirty, put a capfull of distilled white vinegar in a sink full of cold water and rinse it there. Pat the clean stalks with a paper towel to dry them.



You can see above that the color can vary quite a bit from the outside to the inside. Keep the small leafy stems from the inside to go in your Bloody Mary and dice up the larger pieces.

Cut each one lengthwise before dicing one or two stalks together.



For the carrots, don't get those little pre-milled, suppository shaped things they market to kids. Get real, carrot-shaped carrots. Cut off the leafy top, and also the stringy root at the smaller end.



Chop longer pieces from the smaller end, and thinner pieces from the big end.



Clean up as you go, putting all the trimmed pieces in the trash, and the diced pieces into the bowls you set aside at the beginning.



Sauté everything together in a little melted fat -- bacon, lard or butter.

How to dice an onion

Lots of recipes have the line "1 medium onion, diced" in the ingredients. Not too many of them show you how to do that. Here's a simple way that's easy to learn and pretty quick.

First, cut the pointy end off.



Then put the cut end on the cutting board and cut it in half straight down the middle.



Now that you have it split, it's much easier to peel the papery outer layers off.



Now comes the real dicing. Cut down and in, starting at one side and moving across to the other. The closer you make these cuts, obviously the smaller the dice will be.



Notice in the picture that I'm starting with the tip of the knife about a half-inch away from the root. You don't want to actually separate all the pieces from the base yet, and it's surprisingly easy to misjudge how the length of you knife will compare to the round onion.

Continue making cuts all the way across the onion.



Once you've made cuts all the way across, cut straight down cross-wise up to about a half-inch from the root.



If you hate waste -- or your mother drilled into you that you should never throw away food -- once you get close the the root, turn what's left on it's end and finish dicing.



The important part here is not to get the solid piece of the root into what you're cooking. It's better to throw out one or two little pieces that could be used than to cook a solid chunk of root.

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If you want long, even pieces instead of small ones, here's how to slice an onion in shreds.