How to cut Chinese cabbage correctly: ways to chop up a Chinese vegetable for salad and other dishes, chop sticks with your hands and with the help of electrical appliances, photo

Beijing cabbage is a very useful product originally from China, which has, at the same time, good taste.

Some eat it separately, some add it to salads, some make it cabbage rolls, casseroles, or even stuff it. Human fantasy in this case is limitless, and everyone can find a recipe to their liking.

No matter what you cook, it is very important to chop the Peking cabbage correctly, which will be discussed in this article.

Why is it important to do it right?

It has long been known that the taste qualities of a dish are strongly dependent on cuts. Try, for example, to imagine Caesar salad, which is cut into the same volume of chicken as on Olivier, the quail eggs are finely crumbled, not cut in half, and cherry tomatoes are cut into small cubes. It is unlikely that it will be like the dish that everyone knows, and many love it so much.

In addition to taste, the appearance of the dish and its texture also depend on cutting, which is so important to preserve if the dish is prepared for the arrival of guests, for a beloved family or for a festive table. In the end, improper cutting can lead to wasting some part of the cabbage in vain.

Instruction

What to take inventory?

Everything is simple:

The knife should be as sharp as possible, well sharpened, with a long blade of medium (closer to large) width in order to accurately and accurately cut thin leaves.
A glass or wooden board is taken - it also does not matter, as long as the surface is smooth (although it will most likely be more convenient to cut on a wooden board).
We also need a deep bowl.

The size

The size of the cut depends on the dish into which the cabbage is cut:

On the Caesar salad, for example, Peking cabbage, on the contrary, is cut quite large.
On Kim Chi - even larger (in fact - almost not cut).
Shredder also comes in different sizes - finely chopped cabbage goes for salads, large - for soups and other dishes that are subjected to heat treatment.

Training

Separate the leaves from the head, discard the top, and rinse the rest well.
Pour cold water into a bowl and drop Beijing cabbage leaves for a few minutes to preserve their shape and juiciness.
Remove the leaves from the water, shake them and dry with paper towels.

In no case can not get rid of the white part of the leaves: it is the most juicy and contains more nutrients than the green part.

How to cut into Kim Ji?

Kim Chi - Korean salad, recently arrived in Russia.For its preparation are used Peking cabbage leaves, fermented in a special solution. For this Peking cabbage leaves are cut in a special way:

It takes cabbage forks, washes under a stream of cold water, the upper leaves are removed.
Cabbage fork is cut in half along the length of the petioles (white parts) so as not to damage the leaves. Separate the forks slowly and gently so that the Beijing cabbage leaves are gently separated from each other.
Each half needs to be cut again along the length of the petioles and divided, preserving the integrity of the leaves.
At the same time, if the cabbage forks are taken very small, it can be cut only into two parts.
The resulting equal four parts and soaked in a special solution.

Crumble into Caesar Salad

Traditionally, “Caesar” Peking cabbage is cut into large. From the leaf, as a rule, they cut off and leave only the green part. The white, hard part of the leaf can be added to the soup or stewed with something. Each green piece of a sheet should be divided either into two or four parts (depending on your desire and size of the sheet).

Another variant of cutting, unconventional - to cut or tear manually the entire sheet (including the white part) into small squares of 2x2.Although this option is not a classic, it can be even better, because the white part of the Chinese cabbage, which is not used for the traditional Caesar salad, is more juicy and contains many useful substances.

Shred

There are several ways to chop Chinese cabbage. This is an extremely fast and versatile way of cutting.

Prepared (washed, etc.) cabbage should be placed on the board and cut in two in white pieces. Next, you need to put the halves of cabbage on the board cut down and, trying all the time to make the same indents, starting from the edge of the cabbage cut into strips. This will help chop the cabbage finely. Such cutting is perfect for salads.
For a large shredder, you also need to divide the cabbage forks into two parts, then cut each half exactly along the center. There should be equal quarters. Shred the cabbage across the width you want. A large shredder is usually used if you are going to add Peking cabbage to soup or other hot dishes, i.e. heat treat it.
The easiest and fastest way to shred Chinese cabbage is to shredder in standard kitchen electronics, such as a combine, blender, and meat grinder with a nozzle for vegetables. This is done like this:
1. Cabbage, washed and dried with paper towels, is cut into small pieces, so that they can easily pass into the loading opening. Do not load too bulky pieces of cabbage: it can break the device.
2. Next you need to assemble the device by installing the nozzle for shredding the desired size.
3. Turn on the device and gradually load new pieces of Chinese cabbage into it, pushing them against the rotating blade with a pusher.
The use of electrical appliances makes it possible to achieve a very fine shredder, perfectly suited for some salads.

If you chop Beijing cabbage manually, you should remember how to keep the knife, because it affects the speed of the shredder, and the safety of this event.

The knife is held all over the palm, while the thumb is on the side of the blade, the index finger is on top of the knife, as if “pressing” on the blade, and the other fingers are under the handle, but so that there is no contact with the blade.

A photo

Check out what Peking cabbage looks like in the photo.

What is the wrong cutting and what is it fraught with?

The wrong cutting of Peking cabbage is cutting it into pieces of the size unsuitable for a particular dish. Simply put, a thin shredder of cabbage on Caesar, small slices on Kim-Chi are all examples of incorrect slicing of Peking cabbage.

The consequences of this are quite understandable - in fact, it turns out to be a completely different dish, not the one you wanted to cook. He really can have a completely different taste. For example, if it is too thin to chop cabbage at Caesar, large, bulky pieces of chicken, halves of cherry tomatoes and a couple of thinnest strips of Peking cabbage will be on the fork. Of course, this will not be the same salad that is served in good restaurants.

So, we told you about the features of the correct cutting of Chinese cabbage, about preparing cabbage, about what types of cutting are and for which dishes each of them is used, what tools are needed for cutting and what is fraught with errors in this delicate matter. We hope our article will be useful for you and your dishes will be exactly the way you wanted to cook them. We wish you good luck in cooking!