Vol. IV · Knives, Tools and the Work Space Plate 4 of 10Chinese knife work, 刀工, slices, shreds, cubes, strips, chunks, mince, roll cut, scoringTF

Chinese Knife Work.

In a Chinese dish the ingredients share a shape: shredded pork with shredded peppers, diced chicken with peanuts. The knife decides the dish.

Chinese cooks treat knife work (刀工) as one of the two foundations of the cuisine, with fire control (火候, XXVII.2). The basic shapes are few and named: 片 (thin slices), 丝 (shreds, slices cut into fine strips), 丁 (cubes about a centimetre), 条 (thick strips), 块 (chunks), 粒 and 末 (grains and mince). A dish is built on one shape: 青椒肉丝, shredded pork with green pepper, has every ingredient in shreds; 宫保鸡丁, Kung Pao chicken, has every ingredient in cubes, the size of the peanuts.

The reason is the wok. Stir-frying takes a minute or two; everything must cook through in that time and be picked up together by chopsticks. Two special techniques add to the basic shapes: the roll cut (滚刀块), cutting long vegetables at an angle while rolling them a quarter turn between cuts, which gives chunky pieces with lots of surface; and scoring (花刀), cutting a crisscross into thick ingredients such as squid or kidney so they cook fast, curl attractively and catch the sauce.

Below: the chosen Chinese cut at true size, with its surface per gram and cooking time relative to a 1 cm cube.

What you will learn
Workshop
The cut drawn at true size (typical sizes; regional practice varies). Relative cooking time scales with the square of the smallest dimension, against a 12 mm cube.

One dish, one shape

A shred of 2 mm cooks in about 0.03 of the time of a 12 mm cube; a 片 slice of the same thickness is just as quick (0.03) but holds more sauce on its broad faces; a 丁 of 10 mm needs 0.69 and a 块 of 25 mm 4.34 times as long. In a wok over a strong flame, shreds and slices are done in well under a minute; cubes in two or three; chunks are for braising, red-cooking and steaming.

Scoring changes the arithmetic for thick ingredients. A squid body or a pork kidney scored in a fine crisscross to two-thirds of its depth behaves like pieces a few millimetres thick: it cooks in the seconds a stir-fry allows, curls into a pine-cone or flower shape (麦穗花刀, 菊花刀), and the cuts hold the sauce. Whole fish are scored on the diagonal for the same reasons before steaming or frying (XIX.4).

At the stove

Make 青椒肉丝: slice pork loin across the grain into 3 mm slices, cut them into 3 mm shreds, and cut a green pepper into shreds of the same size. Stir-fry the pork, then the pepper, then together with a little soy sauce. Every bite is one shred of each; that is the point of the knife work.

Classical Chinese writing praised knife work extravagantly: the Zhuangzi's cook Ding (庖丁) carved an ox so smoothly, following its joints, that his knife stayed sharp for nineteen years.

Terms

刀工 (knife work)
The skill of cutting ingredients to the shape and size a dish needs.
丝 (shreds)
Fine strips cut from thin slices, usually 2–3 mm square.
滚刀块 (roll cut)
Angled cuts made while rolling the vegetable a quarter turn each time.
花刀 (scoring)
Patterned cuts into thick ingredients to speed cooking, shape them and hold sauce.
In Chinese cooking the cut defines the dish: one shape for every ingredient, sized for the seconds or minutes the wok allows.

Sources

  1. A teaching value chosen for the course: the right order of magnitude and shape, not a measurement of a particular food.