[HN Gopher] Japanese vegetable cutting techniques (2021)
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Japanese vegetable cutting techniques (2021)
Author : robin_reala
Score : 160 points
Date : 2022-08-13 11:03 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thechefdojo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (thechefdojo.com)
| Zababa wrote:
| I use the ran-giri all the time while cutting carrots, I think
| it's the shape that fits them the best.
| Paul_S wrote:
| Must be convergent evolution because these exist everywhere.
| layer8 wrote:
| > Sometimes also referred to as Kokotto-kiri (kokotsutoQie ri)
| for smaller versions. I have no idea what that is in reference
| to.
|
| 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.
|
| [0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocotte_(cuisine)
| propter_hoc wrote:
| Whatever the origin, this cut is both old and common in classic
| French cuisine, known as the tourne.
|
| Par exemple: http://chut-je-cuisine.com/pommes-de-terre-
| tournees/
| OJFord wrote:
| I'm interested in how it's a _kind of_ casserole, if you can
| expand on that (en anglaise svp!)?
|
| 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 etre?
| layer8 wrote:
| While the "-tte" indicates a diminutive, cocottes aren't
| particularly small. I wrote "a kind of" because I associate
| particular materials with them, including the enamel, which I
| don't necessarily with what is called a casserole in English
| (which in turn is different from what is called a "casserole"
| in French, which is more a sauce pan). Maybe someone else has
| better knowledge about those cookware terms.
| OJFord wrote:
| C'est interessant, merci!
|
| 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.)
| m_t wrote:
| Cocotte id a pan with a lid, usually in cast iron. The Le
| Creuset are most likely the more well known one. They can be
| small or big.
|
| 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| Oh ok, in (British) English I'd just call that a casserole.
| (Which per sibling comment from GGP I understand is not the
| same/more specific than a casserole in French.) So I
| suppose it's correct that it ends up at 'Dutch oven' (the
| predominantly American term for the same) on Wikipedia.
|
| I'm afraid my French isn't up to reading a Wikipedia entry,
| which is why I asked (GGP linked the same article).
| shakow wrote:
| > more specific than a casserole in French.
|
| 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.
| kakkun wrote:
| In Japan, I've known the term "Kokotto" to refer a ramekin
| vessel. Yeah, it's also a kind of french dish, though I don't
| think it's too commonly known in Japan.
|
| As for the cut, I'd hardly call it a Japanese cutting
| technique.
| limoce wrote:
| Not very unique to Japan. You can also see these techniques in
| other East Asian countries like China, Korea. Japanese guys are
| good at promoting their cultures anyway.
| eternalban wrote:
| I'm not sure these are necessarily limited to east Asia (minus
| the apple dragons at the end). This reminds me -- entirely
| orthogonal -- of the big deal made about the fact that pyramids
| were constructed on disconnected continents. Seems to me it
| boils down to geometry and physics -- there are only so many
| ways to heap stuff. Same with the veggies. These are just the
| natural permutations for the most part.
|
| 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.
| wavefunction wrote:
| It's a blog about Japanese food which is why they're talking
| about "Japanese techniques."
|
| 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.
| jbay808 wrote:
| This should be the top comment. It's like criticizing a
| tutorial page on pythonguy.com titled "Python techniques for
| copying data structures" because the author didn't explain
| that the same techniques are used in Julia.
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| OJFord wrote:
| And West Asian, and all Asian, and European, and American..
| 1-6 wrote:
| The question then becomes, who doesn't cut their food this
| way? Astronauts?
| klyrs wrote:
| Stone age cultures?
| rasengan0 wrote:
| Pro-tip: Sensei said the best Ran-giri (Luan Qie ri) is done
| after a bottle of Junmai Daiginjo
| supernova87a wrote:
| By the way, although the "secret Japanese techniques" aspect of
| this is a little overblown (little here is really _that_
| interesting), there is at least one reason for this to be
| highlighted at all. Given that forks and knives are not the
| common utensils of the north* Asian dining table, most things are
| pre-cut for consumption. If you ever encounter steak /pork/katsu
| chops, etc. at a restaurant, you will find that they are all pre-
| cut for you to be able to consume in bite sized pieces. You'll
| never get a whole slab of chicken breast or pork chop for you to
| dissect with chopsticks.
|
| *added qualifier to satisfy detailed criticism
| hbarka wrote:
| >> Given that forks and knives are not the common utensils of
| the Asian dining table
|
| 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.
| supernova87a wrote:
| Well, I just mean those restaurants that are not western
| food. You're _usually_ going to get chopsticks and the
| reasoning is for that. Thailand, etc. may get an exception to
| the story, fine.
| LordAtlas wrote:
| Hi. I'm from India, an Asian country. We have 1.3 billion
| people. We don't use chopsticks.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Where I live in the Midwest US, most people from Asia or
| with Asian ancestry are Hmong, Korean, Chinese or
| Japanese. Essentially, "Asian" has become a euphemism for
| "East Asian". There's a notable exception in Rochester,
| Minnesota, where the Mayo Clinic and related industry
| drew a lot of immigration from India.
|
| 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| nmskaar / To give the benefit of the doubt - in the UK
| (and perhaps elsewhere) India is practically never
| considered 'Asian' in common parlance. As if 'the Indian
| subcontinent' (as _is_ said) were actually a continent
| almost, subordinate to nothing.
|
| 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 hiNdii aur bhaartiiy
| khaane kaa vidyaarthii (student of Hindi and Indian
| food).)
| chris_wot wrote:
| I did a text search of this article, and nowhere does it use
| the word "secret".
| supernova87a wrote:
| Not saying the article says they're "secret". I'm just
| observing that for some reason, given the identification of
| these cutting techniques as specifically Japanese, given
| headline status here at HN, on the very existence of an
| article about a fairly mundane task, it seems to imply
| something special (and in the click-baity "secret techniques
| the kitchen doesn't want you to know about" memes) about
| this.
| zmgsabst wrote:
| They're identifying by name the techniques used in Japanese
| cuisine -- not claiming they're unique or secret.
|
| The same way we use "julienne" in French cuisine.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Correct, nowhere in the article did they claim the cuts
| were unique.
|
| 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...
| adhesive_wombat wrote:
| Why is it that the stereotypical love of intense systematisation
| and specialisation in Japanese crafts doesn't seem to extend to
| software?
|
| 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.
| enqk wrote:
| Being a programmer in Japan is somewhat low-status at the
| moment.
| GolDDranks wrote:
| I don't think so. That's maybe 10-15 years ago, but currently
| (according to this:
| https://benesse.jp/juken/202105/20210501-1.html, a survey
| made just 2021), a programmer is the 3rd, and a system
| engineer is the 4th highest desired occupation among Japanese
| high-schoolers, after a nurse and a local government
| official.
| enqk wrote:
| It's because I generally interact with people in my age
| group, i.e 10-15 years older than high schoolers.
|
| If you ask kids in some other countries, what do they say?
| influencers? youtuberd?
| grogenaut wrote:
| From what friends said who worked there in the early 00s it's
| been that way for a while. Hardware was the rockstar. This is
| part of why Sony Japan finally relented and let the eu/us do
| the software on the PlayStation and Japan focused on the
| hardware making an excellent parternership.
| numpad0 wrote:
| It does extend, just it results in a moving castle of an
| infoelectromechanical self complication with overly
| bureaucratic interfaces, tons of back channel behaviors and
| tangential error messages.
|
| 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.
| rurounijones wrote:
| This comment I made, and others in the thread, a while ago
| might shed some light on the subject:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27179677
| chris_wot wrote:
| I don't understand the intense negativity of comments on this
| post. What is fascinating is that the Japanese has systematised
| cutting to the degree where things become more specialised the
| more conplicated the cut.
|
| 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?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| There's a raw nerve around a specific kind of exoticism found
| in writings about Japan, where they're so _weird_ and
| _different_ and _secret_. I do think the intro plays into that.
|
| Nothing here is super different from most cutting except maybe
| the decorative cuts, and annoyingly that's actually the
| shortest part of the article.
| chris_wot wrote:
| I have to say, this surprised me. I had to reread the intro
| again, because I didn't see the author refer to any of that,
| and I thought I must have misread 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...
| bzxcvbn wrote:
| There are also sentences like:
|
| > Unfortunately, in Japanese cooking, there are
| approximately 100 times more cutting techniques and names.
| chris_wot wrote:
| Yes, and? Not sure I see the problem here.
| OJFord wrote:
| I don't know what I was expecting, but this is really stupid.
| Enough that it's worth it for the amusement factor.
|
| 'List of Japanese words that describe the various ways you chop
| and slice vegetables' would be merely educational.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Cutting food to the right shape to cook right and look nice
| really scratches all my engineer/programmer/chemist itches and
| when I get irritated because someone else in my household doesn't
| cut the vegetables "right" I have to take a breath and remind
| myself that this is MY problem not theirs.
|
| This article gave me fun names for what I already knew and loved.
| HidyBush wrote:
| I started reading the article and was bored out of my mind. But
| then the author told me these weren't simple cutting techniques I
| have already used over and over for decades, but _japanese_
| cutting techniques. Naturally this gave it a mysterious and
| exotic flavor I had never experienced before and now I feel like
| a medieval ninja when I slice my pretend-japanese carrots! /s
| 1-6 wrote:
| I'll need to put together a website with various Japanese
| Python Function Techniques.
| Ntrails wrote:
| I was shocked to discover they use the exact same set of
| techniques as the French, but with totally different names!
| wirthjason wrote:
| dmitriid wrote:
| > Unfortunately, in Japanese cooking, there are approximately 100
| times more cutting techniques and names.
|
| 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.
| wavefunction wrote:
| You're telling me "julienne" is an English cutting technique?
| That's obviously French.
| cinntaile wrote:
| It's just that the French name got associated with the act of
| cutting fine sticks in English, it sounds cooler than cutting
| fine sticks. Probably popularized by some famous chef that
| wrote books or did tv shows. It doesn't make the cutting
| technique French.
| OJFord wrote:
| You're right of course but it's not really the point is it -
| it's an adopted English term, these 'techniques' are used the
| world over including by amateurs.
|
| 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.
| wavefunction wrote:
| I was mostly poking fun at the commenters on this article
| at the time and their absolutist literalist reading of the
| article headline. Japan didn't invent these techniques
| necessarily, but they are a part of the defined culture of
| Japanese cuisine. Like French cuisine, there are defined
| processes for how a vegetable is treated for a specific
| context, whereas an amateur or other cuisine might not make
| a big point of dicing vs chopping 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| That's probably much stronger in Japanese culture sure,
| but to continue the Julienne example, 'properly' done
| it's not simply matchsticks - it's thicker and shorter
| than people often think/would do to show off their knife
| skills.
|
| 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.
| bardworx wrote:
| Maybe I can help with some context. Broadly speaking, there is
| a Western style (French) and Eastern style. The big difference
| is that French cooking is very systematized, Escoffier took
| inspiration from his time in the army, as such, we have cooking
| "brigades".
|
| 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > that all have a specific name, as an example.
|
| Are these "special names" like the "100 names of snow" and
| actually are literally "dice diagonally", "slice laterally",
| "make small cubes" etc.?
| bigcat12345678 wrote:
| Wait when you start learning the Chinese cutting techniques:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXCCfwuPwy8
| chris_wot wrote:
| Not sure if you are being sarcastic, but that's actually kind
| of cool!
| bigcat12345678 wrote:
| Japanese cooking skill is kind of methodical, fine toolings
| (knifes, dishes, heating method); kind of mixing of
| traditional oriental and western influences.
|
| Chinese cooking is plain art. Very limited toolings but
| plenty of beauty and transformation of food into pleasure.
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