Upgrading your knife skills is one of the most important things you can do to be a better cook. From knowing to , it is relatively easy to practice knife skills. But, often, when reading recipes, you will come across instructions to cut an ingredient "lengthwise" or "crosswise.
" For some, that might be intuitive, learned from observing family elders in the kitchen. But for those who teach themselves to cook, what do those two terms mean? The easiest way to think of it is to picture a vegetable — let's use a bell pepper for this scenario — and to locate where the stem is. When the stem is away from you, and the pepper is cut from the stem down to its apex, you are cutting along its length, also known as cutting it lengthwise.
Some call this cutting "pole to pole" if you were to imagine the vegetable as a planet, cutting from its "north" (stem) to its "south" (apex or opposite end). As for cutting crosswise, that's across the width of the vegetable. To continue the planet analogy, it would be cutting across the equator or along latitudinal lines.
If you were to do this with a bell pepper, it would result in wide rings of pepper. Both methods are useful for different situations. So whether you are cutting vegetables, fruits, or meat, it is worth knowing when to employ which cut.
When to employ lengthwise cuts With many fruits and vegetables, it is obvious which is the stem end. In the case of produce with stalks like celery and scallions, it is easy to determine its long (re.