Japanese vegetable cutting techniques (2021)
thechefdojo.com
thechefdojo.com
'List of Japanese words that describe the various ways you chop and slice vegetables' would be merely educational.
This likely refers to “cocotte” [0], the French term for a kind of casserole that might be used for dishes for which that vegetable cut shape is typical — or maybe the shape of the cut is reminiscent of the shape of a cocotte.
English Wikipedia cocotte disambiguation suggests French oven, which redirects to Dutch oven, which is just what Americans call a casserole.
Is it the enamelling, which Wikipedia suggests is sometimes used as a distinguishing feature between 'Dutch' and 'French' ovens? (I've (British) never heard of the latter before.)
Apparently a cocotte is also an 'elegant prostitute'/courtesan, meaning 'small child' before that. So is a cocotte a small casserole, peut être?
It seems cocotte = English 'casserole'; casserole = saucepan.
The enamel vs. cast iron interior of a cocotte IME in the UK is not significant, but in the US going by Wikipedia anyway enamel = French oven; pas d'enamel = Dutch oven.
...I suppose we've no hope of agreeing on all this if we can't even have a 'cup' be the same size! (Or convince Americans that they shouldn't be (and in many cases would find it easier if they weren't) using volumetric measures for everything anyway, for that matter.)
The French Wikipedia article is clearer than the English one : https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocotte_(cuisine)
Note that a pressure cooker is called a Cocotte minute. Because it cooks quickly.
Cocotte is also a term that can be used for chickens or chicks, but that has nothing to do with cooking utensils.
I'm afraid my French isn't up to reading a Wikipedia entry, which is why I asked (GGP linked the same article).
It's rather that they are false-friends: a french « casserole » is an english ‶sauce pan″ (the most vanilla cookware, a metal pot with a handle).
A cocote has typically more heat inertia (made of thick casted iron), is larger (so you can cook large pieces of meat in it) and thus far less handy.
As for the cut, I'd hardly call it a Japanese cutting technique.
Par exemple: http://chut-je-cuisine.com/pommes-de-terre-tournees/
I have seen a few pieces of Japanese megacorp software that's you would have thought would be produced by their better teams (kernel code for major profit-centre products) and it was always dreadful.
I know megacorp software is often terrible, but this was a whole new level. It was like the "the intern's code" jokes on The Coding Love, but real and very serious (NDAs and everything).
Certainly when looking at it, I didn't have visions of a grandmaster lovingly using the exact, named, carefully maintained, tool for the job.
If you ask kids in some other countries, what do they say? influencers? youtuberd?
(Unless 'desirable' is a bit misleading here and there is some realistic achievability built in?)
The Japanese culture is not known to focus on setting global goals and recursively dividing it into local decision makings and actions. Rather it’s optimized for optimizing local behaviors, which yields amazing features, but often only as features.
I did find this very interesting. Not trying to shame the critics, but there are interesting things in this article and whilst it may not be in testing to you, that’s ok just move along?
Nothing here is super different from most cutting except maybe the decorative cuts, and annoyingly that’s actually the shortest part of the article.
But no, he neither says they are secret, weird or even different. He literally writes “ In this article, we will take a look at some of the common vegetable cutting techniques used in Japanese cooking.”
How does the intro play into any of these things? Japanese culture seems to have been using these cuts for an extraordinarily long time, and the techniques appear to have been developed in isolation to the development of western cuts. I don’t see people complaining about articles on French-style cuts not noting that these cuts are the same as Japanese cuts…
> Unfortunately, in Japanese cooking, there are approximately 100 times more cutting techniques and names.
This article gave me fun names for what I already knew and loved.
This article places the shapes or cutting techniques described within the context of Japanese cuisine. That someone somewhere else has at one time or another cut a vegetable does not really reflect on the formal techniques of a cuisine whether that be French, Chinese, Italian, Korean, Japanese or other cuisines that put a significant focus on defined techniques and following specific processes.
Maybe readers are inferring some nationalistic element to a cooking tutorial, where people assume that a description of techniques used in Japanese cooking is some kind of claim to ownership of them?
I think this article is interesting on its own terms, because regardless of your heritage, if you haven't studied cooking you might not have experimented with how you cut vegetables. I always used to just straight chop everything when I made a stir fry, but now I try to be more creative.
As for techniques, my favorite is cutting a minimal slice off of round items (think onions) to use as a flat stable bottom before attempting thin slicing.
Chinese cooking is plain art. Very limited toolings but plenty of beauty and transformation of food into pleasure.
And then proceeds to identify and name them using English cutting techniques and names.
There aren't "100 times more names". Every language will have those names.
And I don't know Japanese, but it doesn't even seem like they have a plethora of more descriptive terms for it than 'finely diced', 'roughly diced' etc. when they're both something-kiri too, for example.
From my imperfect understanding of Japanese cuisine, there is usually "a way to prepare a dish" and deviation from that way can be unwanted or problematic, a bit of a social faux pas.
But yes sure, deviate in France and you might get some bad reviews, be labelled avant-garde, but it's probably fine, and you might be on the way to greatness. I'm pretty ignorant of Japanese culture (not that I'm French either, just spent many holidays there and none in Japan) but I can believe there'd be a stronger visceral reaction to that sort of thing. Boycott the insauspicious restaurant or whatever.
In Eastern style, especially in Japanese/Sushi culinary world, you still julienne a veg similar to all other culinary cultures but Sushi requires special modification for each dish. It’s not saying it’s superior or whatnot, it’s just that sushi requires 5-7 different “types” of julienne, that all have a specific name, as an example.
Some of those techniques are so specific, they aren’t translated or practiced outside of sushi preparation and may not have a “name”.
At least that’s how I took that statement.
Are these "special names" like the "100 names of snow" and actually are literally "dice diagonally", "slice laterally", "make small cubes" etc.?
For example: in French terms, you’d have to explicitly say “julienne the scallions across and dump them in an ice bath”.
For sushi, that’s an explicit technique. The cut, length, trim, and preparation can be conveyed in one word.
So lots of terms but no ambiguity.
Edit: “western” techniques do this too. Braising vs blenching X provides a lot of context that isn’t explicitly stated.
*added qualifier to satisfy detailed criticism
Asia is a big umbrella, my friend. (You can Google for how many countries.) You’d be surprised to know there are Asian countries that went from hands to spoon-and-fork hundreds of years ago and never knew chopsticks. But of course this notion is not exotic enough.
As a result, "India" is occasionally lumped in with "South Asia" but is typically referred to as its own entity in lay conversation.
I suspect part of that is proximity to the middle east, which is also rarely lumped in with "Asia" in colloquial conversation, and general confusion or laziness over needing to specify the "east" part of "east Asia".
Other parts of the country probably speak differently based on who lives there.
I can say this though - if I want to go to a restaurant for "Asian" food, it'll usually be Chinese, Japanese or Vietnamese, and the restaurant will typically offer dishes from at least two of those cuisines (sometimes authentic, sometimes heavily tailored to a Midwestern pallet). On the other hand, if I want Indian food, I'm going to an Indian restaurant, and the closest thing on offer to one of the other above cuisines is some variation of a Manchurian dish from Mumbai, depending on what regional focus or focuses the restaurant offers.
I am curious now though - obviously spoons have been around 'forever' but as eating utensils do they predate British/Portugese colonialism do you know? I understand today spoon/bread/hand is dish, region, and perhaps to some extent class/personal preference dependent, but has it 'always' been so?
(I'm honestly not doing a 'be thankful we brought you spoons' bit here.. I hope it doesn't come across that way. Just genuinely curious as a हिंदी और भारतीय खाने का विद्यार्थी (student of Hindi and Indian food).)
The same way we use “julienne” in French cuisine.
I cannot fathom why people are so defensive about this article and say it makes claims it never does actually make. This might actually be more interesting than the article itself…