Size matters
Katerina Pavlakis 
How to chop your veggies with intention
You might have heard me ranting about cheffy knife skills before, and I maintain: cutting edge knife speed and technique do not matter in your home kitchen.
What matters though is understanding the effect of size in your cooking: it's time to become aware of all the ways the size of food pieces affects what's cooking.
There is no right or wrong - but once you understand how it works you can choose with intention how you chop your veggies (or anything else for that matter).
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Cooking time
The biggest effect of size is the cooking time: larger/thicker pieces need longer, smaller/thinner pieces need less time to cook through.
If you want something to cook quickly cut it smaller or thinner. Especially useful if you want to use dense root veggies in a quick cooking style dish.
Examples:
- carrot strips (use a peeler) will cook quickly in a stir fry
- potatoes sliced thinly for a bake or gratin won't need forever
- strips of carrot/sweet potato/parsnip/courgette make a nice non-starchy base for pasta sauce.
- veggie 'crumbs': put cauliflower or broccoli through a blender to break them down to crumbs - cooks like rice in 2 mins, useful for bold flavours, to 'hide' veggie content, non-starchy 'rice' and in a crust or even cake.
- minced (ground) meat is really useful for quick cook dishes (also cheaper as it uses cheaper cuts that would normally need longer cooking)
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Dispersal (mixing)
The smaller the pieces the more they will mix into everything else.
Use this intentionally either way: in a sauce you might want everything to mix up well. In a stew you might want things to remain chunky.
Examples:
- Sauces, dips and marinades: you probably want everything coated evenly in herbs, garlic etc, so it makes sense to finely chop, crush or even blend.
- Finely diced onion (and other veggies that soften) will disintegrate with cooking to the point of disappearing into the dish. If this is your intention/preference dice finely, if you prefer it chunky stick to larger pieces.
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Taste
Bigger pieces will give you a blast of that taste or texture while the same ingredient cut very finely or crushed will give you more of 'a little everywhere' experience (eg. roughly chopped ginger vs grated ginger, or chunks of tomato vs tomato passata)
And there's something else to keep in mind too:
Some plants react with oxygen when 'injured' (e.g. cut, crushed) to create strong tasting 'defence' substances meant to keep predators at bay (plants can't run away).
Examples are onions, garlic and horseradish - the more you cut/crush them the more surface is exposed to oxygen the stronger the taste/smell/heat.
Finely chopped onion will taste stronger of onion than roughly chopped. A crushed garlic clove will taste more garlicky than a chopped one. This also explains why cutting the onion across the layers causes more tears than cutting along the layers - cutting across crushes more onions cells and releases more defences.
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Texture / mouth feel
Size also affects the texture of each mouthful, not only because of the different amounts of chewing required but also because of the way the different pieces feel (and of course taste) in our mouth.
Examples:
- A chunky soup has a different feel, and taste, than a smooth one
- A finely chopped pesto feels, and tastes, different to a pesto made with pestle and mortar and again different to a pesto made in a blender. The different ingredients will be more 'present' in a rougher version, while the smooth blended version will give more of a 'uniform' feel and taste experience.
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Just to be clear: None of the above comes with right or wrong label attached!
It's up to you to decide what you want, how you like it, and how much time you have for cooking.
But once you shape your awareness on such details (which often appear in recipes without explanation) you empower yourself to be intentional: to play and experiment with your chopping sizes, and find what works and tastes best for you - regardless the recipe.
