Knife Skills

I've been cooking for about 25 years and over the past 3 years have started cooking professionally. When you cook professionally nothing is more important than "prep" time. The day before or hours before the meal where you get together your ingredients and chop, dice and sort them. As I cook more and more I've come to realize the importance of good knife skills. I took a basic knife skills class from Chef Central and got some good pointers, and time savers; but the ultimate Knife Skills class is taught by Norman Weinstein at the Institute of Culinary Education . He is the knife skills guru, he even wrote a best selling book Mastering Knife Skills on the topic. His class sells out within 3 days of being posted on the ICE website, so when I got the newsletter and schedule of courses in the mail today the first thing I did was log onto the website to see if I made it in time to register for his class...Major Score! I did it! I finally was able to register for his coveted Knife Skills class! By Monday there will be no spaces available for any of his 20 classes for the summer and a wait list will be established. This was my 4th time attempting to register for one of his Knife Skills classes and you really have to strike while the iron is hot! If there is any advice that I can give regarding being an accomplished cook, master your knife skills because once that is mastered everything else comes easy. Stay tuned for my post in June about the details of what I learned.