Knife skills: how to julienne, brunoise, chiffonade and dice

Knife skills are one system: square the vegetable off, slice it into planks, cut the planks into sticks and cut the sticks across into cubes. A julienne is a stick ⅛ in (3 mm) square; a brunoise is a ⅛ in (3 mm) cube. Leaves are stacked, rolled and sliced into ribbons: a chiffonade. Pinch the knife by the blade and hold the food in a claw.

This guide covers the setup and grip, the five ways to move the knife and which knife to use, then julienne, brunoise, chiffonade, dicing an onion, mincing garlic and a few shaped cuts, each step by step. After that: why even cuts matter, a troubleshooting table, plating, safety, a practice drill, the history of the words, the science and ten myths. The knife cuts chart draws all 24 standard cuts to scale; this page is the how. Sources are at the bottom.

The handle grip has its place. Holding the handle alone feels secure, but it "doesn't offer the control over the tip that is needed to make precision cuts," so America's Test Kitchen keeps it for honing and mincing herbs.⁴ The claw is old advice, too: Julia Child taught it in 1961, with the fingernails pointed back and "the knuckles of your left hand act as a guide for the next slice."¹²

Honing is not sharpening. An edge is "thousands of small cutting teeth" that bend out of line with use; honing on a steel realigns them, and when that stops working the edge has to be "reground to bring on a new edge." Hone regularly, sharpen occasionally.¹⁵ America's Test Kitchen calls the name "sharpening steel" a misnomer: honing trues the edge, sharpening removes metal.⁴ On a steel, the CIA says to listen for "a light ringing sound; a heavy grinding sound indicates that too much pressure is being applied."¹

Edge angles have moved. The CIA still teaches 20 degrees on the stone and the steel, and Gisslen on the stone.^{1, 2} Makers now quote narrower angles, per side: Wüsthof 14 to 14.5° (10° on its santokus and nakiris), Zwilling about 15° (9 to 12° on its santokus and its Miyabi and Kramer knives), MAC 15°, Global 10 to 15°, Shun 16° and Victorinox 15 to 20°.¹⁴ America's Test Kitchen measured most chef's knives it tested at 13 to 16°.¹³ So the old "15 Japanese, 20 German" rule is out of date: check your maker's figure and say per side, because Victorinox quotes the total.¹⁴

Is it sharp? Zwilling's test: a sharp blade glides through a sheet of paper "without serious pressure or scratching."¹⁵ Julia Child's: it is sharp "if just the weight of it, drawn across a tomato, slits the skin."¹²

If it goes wrong. Tapered, wedge-shaped sticks mean the planks weren't even: square off properly and slice rather than press.¹ A carrot that rolls needs a flat side. The full list is in the troubleshooting table.

The low-waste way. Squaring off a round carrot costs a lot of it (how much). For a salad or a stir-fry where perfect squares don't matter, slice the carrot thinly on a long bias, shingle the ovals in an overlapping row and cut them into strips.²⁴ The strips are uneven at the ends but nothing goes to stock.

Fine julienne and batonnet. The same three steps at other thicknesses give a fine julienne, 1/16 × 1/16 × 1 to 2 in (1.5 × 1.5 × 25 to 50 mm), where a mandoline, used with a cut-resistant glove, helps, and the thicker batonnet, ¼ × ¼ × 2 to 2½ in (6 × 6 × 50 to 60 mm), the stick behind a small dice.

Bell pepper, leek, onion. For a pepper, cut the walls into flat panels and slice off the pale inner membrane so each panel is an even thickness,^{1, 3} then cut strips. For a leek, halve or quarter it lengthwise, rinse the grit out from between the layers, then cut.¹ What recipes call julienned onion is really thin slices cut from root to tip.

1. Start from an even julienne. A brunoise is only as square as the sticks it comes from, so start with a julienne whose strips are all ⅛ in (3 mm) square.
2. Line up the sticks. Gather a small bundle and line up the ends against your claw.
3. Cut across at the same width. Cut straight across the bundle every ⅛ in (3 mm), the same width as the sticks, so every piece is a cube.¹

Rectangles, not cubes? Then the cuts across were wider or narrower than the sticks. Crushed and wet? The knife was dull or pressing down: hone it and let the blade travel. A fine brunoise, 1/16 × 1/16 × 1/16 in (1.5 × 1.5 × 1.5 mm), comes from a fine julienne the same way.

Shallot and onion brunoise. No textbook we read gives a separate method: use the onion method with the cuts about ⅛ in (3 mm) apart, which sits inside America's Test Kitchen's spacing for minced onion, ⅛ to ¼ in (3 to 6 mm).²⁶ Shallots lose little to trimming: The Book of Yields puts the usable part at about 91%.³

Where it goes. Garnish for consommé, sauces and stuffings, and a fine mirepoix for quick sauces. Escoffier cut the vegetables for his mirepoix into a finer or coarser brunoise depending on the dish.⁹⁵

Cut it last. "Freshly chopped basil can quickly turn dull black," says America's Test Kitchen; oil on the whole leaves "barely slowed" it, and oil on the cut basil slowed it but left it oily, so chop basil just before serving.³¹ The CIA's general rule is the same: cut anything that loses colour or flavour as close to service as possible.¹

Why it turns black, honestly. The cause that is actually documented is cold. Sweet basil kept about 12 days at 15 °C (59 °F), but 3 days at 5 °C (41 °F) and 1 day at 0 °C (32 °F),³² and chilling injury (browning and black spots) starts below about 12 °C (54 °F).³³ A home fridge runs near 4 °C (39 °F), so keep basil in a glass of water on the counter, like cut flowers. We found no study of cut-edge darkening from chiffonade, or of tearing versus cutting. Sharp blades measurably reduced browning in cut apples and translucency and discolouration in cut melon,^{67, 68} so a sharp knife and a slicing stroke are sensible, but no one has tested basil.

Which leaves. Large, tender leaves that stack and roll: basil, mint, sage and sorrel, and lettuce, spinach, kale or cabbage. Gisslen's own example is sorrel.² Parsley, cilantro, thyme and rosemary don't roll; gather them into a tight bunch and cut through it, then rock-mince.¹ A lettuce or cabbage chiffonade counts as a cut leafy green, so it goes in the fridge (why).

Potato small dice. Square off the peeled potato by cutting a slice from all sides and keep the trimmings for mash or soup; then "pile the bâtonnets together and cut across in slices 1/4 inch (6 mm) apart."²

How far apart. For diced onion, leave ¼ to ½ in (6 to 13 mm) between cuts; for minced, ⅛ to ¼ in (3 to 6 mm).²⁶

The horizontal cut debate. The textbook method adds "a few horizontal cuts toward but not through" the root after the vertical ones,² as Julia Child did.¹² Those cuts send the blade toward the hand holding the onion, so America's Test Kitchen now teaches two methods without them;^{27, 28} one of its editors cut himself making exactly that cut.²⁸ Kenji López-Alt's position is more precise than the internet version: aim the first cuts radially at a point on the centre line about 60% of the onion's radius below the board, which gave pieces with a standard deviation of about 30% against 50% for vertical cuts; he says a horizontal cut matters with vertical cuts and is "not quite as important" with his radial ones.²⁹

Does it matter? The Pudding's model gives different numbers but agrees that aiming below the board beats vertical cuts: a 34.5% spread in piece size against 37.3% for straight-down cuts, and in the model a horizontal cut "almost never helps with consistency." Aiming every cut at the centre was worst, at 57.7%.³⁰ López-Alt, quoted by The Pudding, says uniformity "matters far more for winning internet debates and solving interesting math problems than it does for cooking."³⁰ Pick the method that feels safe; keep the root on.

Paste without a knife. A mortar and pestle does the same job: crush and grind salted garlic into a paste.¹ Garlic mixed into oil is a food the FDA Food Code says needs temperature control,⁴⁶ so a garlic paste loosened with oil goes in the fridge, not on the counter, and is used within 4 days or frozen.⁴⁹ The popular 10-minute rest after crushing has a thin basis (why).

Mincing herbs. Rinse and dry the herbs, strip the leaves, gather them into a tight ball under your guiding hand and slice through it, then rock-mince with the tip held down. "This need not be a perfectly neat cut, but all the pieces should be roughly the same size."¹ A sharp knife cuts cleanly instead of crushing.

Paysanne, ½ × ½ × ⅛ in (12 × 12 × 3 mm): cut sticks, then "cut them crosswise into thin slices."² The shape has always varied: lozenges for Carême in 1833,⁹² triangles in Escoffier's English edition.⁹⁶ Even the CIA disagrees with itself, its method building paysanne from a thicker stick than its own chart.¹

Rondelle, ⅛ to ½ in thick (3 to 10 mm thick): round slices straight across a carrot or similar.² Halve it lengthwise first for half-moons.¹

Bias: rounds cut at an angle; "the wider the angle, the more" elongated the oval.¹

Oblique (roll cut): cut on a diagonal, roll the vegetable a quarter turn, cut again on the same diagonal. It exposes more surface and shortens cooking time, which is why stir-fries use it. On a tapering carrot, angle the cut closer to straight across as the carrot gets thicker, or the pieces won't match.¹

Tourné, 2 in long, ¾ in across, 7 faces (50 mm long, 20 mm across, 7 faces) in Gisslen: carve each face in a curve, turning the piece "one-seventh of a full turn, to be exact," though "customers rarely count them."² The seven-sided rule is a modern school specification: Escoffier turned vegetables into garlic-clove and olive shapes and counted no faces.⁹⁵ Keep the trim for soup or purée.¹

Brunoise vs dice vs mince. A dice is a measured cube (small, medium or large); a brunoise is the tiniest named dice; mince has no set size and is judged by eye. Julienne vs shredded: a julienne is cut to a square section, a shred is whatever a grater or peeler leaves.

Using a mandoline safely. America's Test Kitchen's rules: wear a cut-resistant glove on the hand holding the food; use the hand guard "if it's any good"; if food sticks, don't push harder; work on a flat, dry surface; and remember "a sharp blade is the safest blade."¹⁹ In 2018 about 19,000 Sharper Image and Frigidaire mandolines were recalled because the small blades in their julienne attachment could separate from the plastic.²⁰ We found no safety source for julienne peelers: the advice in the table is ordinary kitchen practice. Shredded vegetables also keep less well than sticks: finer lettuce shreds stored for less time,⁶⁵ and more cut surface means a stronger wound response.⁶⁴

What the glove ratings mean. In the US, ANSI/ISEA 105 rates cut resistance A1 to A9 by the grams of load a blade needs to cut through, from 200 g at A1 to 6,000 g or more at A9.²¹ In Europe, EN 388 marks cut resistance with a letter from A (at least 2 N) to F (at least 30 N) from the ISO 13997 test, usually beside an older 1 to 5 Coupe score.^{22, 23} Puncture is rated separately:²³ a cut-resistant glove resists a slicing blade, not the stab of a knife tip. No food-safety body names a level for home use, so we don't either. In a study of 1,166 injured workers across industries, the risk of cuts and punctures was 60 to 70% lower while they wore gloves; the study was of workplaces, not kitchens, and its summary does not say what kind of gloves they were.³⁶

They cook evenly and look deliberate. Gisslen gives two reasons for uniform cuts: even cooking and appearance.² The CIA is blunter: uneven pieces "give an impression of carelessness that can spoil the dish's look," and "foods of different sizes and shapes won't cook evenly."¹ The rule is old. A 1740 cookbook cut its beans "to the size of the peas,"⁹⁴ and Escoffier cut soup vegetables as regularly as possible "pour l'unité de cuisson," for even cooking.⁹⁵

Cooking time grows faster than size. Heat soaks in by conduction, so the time to heat a piece through climbs faster than its thickness: in Baldwin's model a 10 mm slab takes about 19 minutes to come to temperature, 20 mm about 50 minutes and 40 mm about 2½ hours. Each doubling costs roughly 2.6 to 3 times the time, heading toward 4 for thicker pieces, and a cube heats faster than a slab of the same thickness because heat comes in from more sides.⁵⁴ The model is for meat in a water bath, but the physics is general: a pan of mixed dice cannot finish together. No study has cooked mixed and uniform dice side by side; this is physics, not a trial.

Smaller pieces lose more vitamin C in water. In blanched potato, longer pieces (more volume per cut surface) kept significantly more vitamin C.⁵⁵ That applies to water-soluble vitamins; carotenoids in carrot don't leach the same way.

What neat cuts cost. The USDA gets 0.70 lb of raw carrot sticks (4 by ½ in, 10 by 1.3 cm) from a pound of carrots but 0.83 lb of chopped carrot, so the sticks cost about 13 more points of weight. The same guide gives 0.88 for onions, 0.80 for bell peppers, and 0.83 for celery whether it is cut into sticks or chopped.²⁵ The Book of Yields, by contrast, gives carrots one trim yield, 81.3%, for chopped, diced or sliced.³ The USDA does not say where the stick loss goes, and its sticks are not squared off. Squaring off can cost far more: cutting a perfectly round carrot down to the largest square that fits inside it throws away about 36% of the cross-section (1 minus 2/π). Real carrots taper, and you rarely square that hard, but the lesson holds: square off only what the dish needs to look square.

Use the trimmings. Vegetable trimmings go into "purées, soups, stews, stocks, fillings for omelets and crêpes,"² potato squarings into mash or soup,² the onion's root end into a mirepoix,² tourné trim into soup or purée,¹ and dark leek greens into a bouquet garni.¹

Brunoise in a clear soup is an old idea. Ude's 1813 bill of fare already lists "La Brunoise au consommé clair."⁸⁹ Keep the cubes to one or two colours and a spoonful per bowl.

Choose the cut for the plate. Julienne gives line and height, brunoise gives a fine scatter or a bed, chiffonade gives a soft, loose finish, and a paysanne or dice gives body to a vegetable garnish. For how each fits a composed plate, see plating components, how to plate food and Michelin-star plating.

Slicing a cooked steak is a different job. Which way the grain runs in each cut, and where the knife goes, is in how to plate steak. Carving a roast bird at its joints is another, and has its own guide: how to carve a turkey.

"The goal is consistency and speed. Without practice, it is impossible to achieve either."¹ Julia Child reckoned on "several weeks of off-and-on practice,"¹² and Tom Colicchio learned from Jacques Pépin's books by buying celery at 39 cents a head just to practise his mirepoix.¹⁰⁴ The Culinary Institute of America's blog lists five basic knife skills: keep the knife sharp, hone it, set up your work area, choose the right knife and know your cuts.¹⁰⁸

The drill. This is adapted from the FCCLA student knife-skills event, which gives contestants 15 minutes to make "six (6) uniform and appropriate pieces" of each of three cuts, with no rulers, and scores the top band as "correct cut, identical in size and shape."¹⁰⁵

1. Set up: board on a damp towel, a sharp knife, two carrots, one potato, half an onion, a few basil leaves.
2. Cut six even pieces each of julienne, brunoise and small dice, plus a chiffonade of the basil and the onion diced. The first few times, ignore the clock; the contest's 15 minutes is a target for later.
3. Check your six against the knife cuts chart at actual size (calibrate it with a bank card, or print it at 100%).
4. When all six of each match the chart, try it against the 15 minutes. Speed comes from repetition, never from rushing. Cook everything you cut.

How the competitions test it. The SkillsUSA national high-school contest gives knife skills 50 of 1,000 points, with tasks such as small dice from half an onion, four minced garlic cloves and 2 oz (57 g) of carrot julienne at ⅛ × ⅛ × 2 in, handed in during a 5-minute window.¹⁰⁶ The American Culinary Federation's Certified Culinarian practical asks for 2 oz (57 g) of julienne carrot, 4 oz (113 g) of batonnet carrot, 4 tablespoons of fine chopped parsley and a pound (450 g) of mirepoix, each scored on weighing and on uniformity.¹⁰⁷ Note that it names the cuts by weight and prints no sizes.

Julienne was a soup long before it was a cut. It first appears in Massialot's Cuisinier roïal et bourgeois of 1691 (not the 1722 edition often cited) as "Potages à la Julienne," and in Massialot's recipe, still in print around 1730, the vegetables went in whole, quartered or tied in bundles, not in strips.^{85, 86} The earliest strips we found are from the 1750s: Menon cuts the soup's roots and greens "en petit filets" in 1755 and, in the same book, cuts roots "comme pour une Julienne," the earliest use of the word as a shape we found.⁸⁷ In English, William Verral's 1759 julienne soup has carrot about an inch long, sliced very thin, then cut into strips,⁸⁸ and in 1813 L. E. Ude uses it as a reference shape: parsley roots "cut in the like manner as for the julienne," and elsewhere slices "as for a julienne, about one line thick and one inch long."⁸⁹ Carême in 1833 gives the modern method: cut to length, slice into ribbons, then into strips about 2.3 mm square.⁹²

No Jean Julien has ever been found. The French historical dictionary says the word probably comes from the first name Julien or Julienne and that how it came to mean the soup "remains obscure";⁹⁸ Etymonline says it was "presumably the name of an otherwise unknown cook."⁹⁹ A chef called Jean Julien appears in no period source we read, only in modern web copy.

Brunoise: Brunoy, probably. "Un potage à la Brunoy" (Brunoy is a town south-east of Paris) is in print in 1808.⁹⁰ Ude's "La Brunoise" of 1813 fries the diced roots "without having lost their original colour,"⁸⁹ while Beauvilliers in 1814 browns them and, when the soup has rice in it, wants the dice no bigger than the cooked rice,⁹¹ and Carême colours his light blond.⁹² So browning was one practice, not the definition, and the "from brun, brown" story is unproven. Ude's use also predates the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest English evidence, 1828.¹⁰⁰

Chiffonade comes from the word for a rag. It is built on French chiffon, a rag, through the verb chiffonner, to crumple, with the cookery ending -ade.⁹⁸ Modern French spells it chiffonnade, English chiffonade. Like julienne it first turns up in soups: a "potage de chiffonnade" is listed in 1767, 65 years before the French dictionary's 1832 date.^{93, 98} Escoffier in 1907 didn't roll the leaves; he squeezed them "tightly between the fingers of the left hand and the table" and cut fine strips.⁹⁶

The first mirepoix recipes had no carrot, onion or celery. "Des cailles, à la Mirepoix" is on the same 1808 menu page as the Brunoy soup,⁹⁰ and Ude's 1813 mirepoix is ham, bacon, butter, bay, parsley and lemon juice.⁸⁹ Escoffier's 1907 mirepoix is carrot, onion and celery cut into a brunoise, with ham or lean bacon.⁹⁵ The earliest attribution we found, Grimod's in 1808, credits quails à la Mirepoix to the Maréchale de Mirepoix, the duke's wife, not to the duke's cook;⁹⁰ we found no 18th-century print of the word.

Dice and mince are the old English words. The Forme of Cury, written by Richard II's cooks around 1390, tells you to "dyce hem" and to cook onions "grete mynced."⁹⁷ Both verbs go back to the late 14th century.⁹⁹ Mise en place, everything prepared before you cook, is dated in English to 1876 by Merriam-Webster,¹⁰¹ and Escoffier's 1907 English glossary defines it as "those elementary preparations which are constantly resorted to."⁹⁶

Teaching it with pictures. Julia Child's 1961 Mastering the Art of French Cooking already teaches the knuckle-guided claw.¹² Jacques Pépin's La Technique (1976)¹⁰² printed more than 1,500 step photographs,¹⁰³ and its companion La Méthode "focused heavily on knife skills, from how to hold your knife to julienning vegetables."¹⁰⁴

Neat cuts are half of a good-looking plate; the other half is where they go. Photograph a dish you cooked and Plate Artists re-plates your own dish the way a chef would, with the moves named so you can do it again for real.