1,532 easy and fully explained recipes, with +66K photos and 78 videos

This site uses only a few technical cookies necessary for its operation. By continuing to browse, you accept their use.
To find out more...

Small, regular pieces

When we cook, bake or pastry, we often have to cut food into small pieces, often cubes, to incorporate them into a recipe or preparation.

How do you get regular pieces fairly quickly?

11 K 4.5/5 (17 reviews)

Keywords for this post:Technique Cutting Pieces Knife Size

Last modified on: November 28^th 2020

For this post: Comment Follow Ask me a question Send to a friend

Small, regular pieces

brunoise de légumes

This need for small, regular pieces often arises when you have to cut up a whole heap of food, usually raw, and dice it most of the time. Note in passing that very small pieces = brunoise, larger pieces = mirepoix, in the vocabulary of cooks.

So it happens a lot, and if you're not too comfortable, you'll intuitively cut a first large piece of the food in question, then cut it into smaller pieces, start again, and so on.

This works, of course, but it takes a long time, and above all you'll be very irregular.

Is there a trick to this?

Yes, yes, well actually it's more a method, a way of doing things, a "taille" as the cooks say.

Take a look at how, for example, to obtain small cubes of cheese (of course, this applies to just about anything else).

en lamelles 1) Start by slicing or shredding everything you've planned, aiming for the thickness of the slices, the size of the dice you're aiming for.

en bâtonnets 2) Stack the slices, then cut them into sticks, using the same size criteria as above.

en dés 3) Finally, cut the sticks (in groups for faster processing) into small cubes.

en brunoise That's it, by proceeding in this way, you'll get the hang of it, and you'll be up and running in no time, especially once you've had a bit of practice.

You can do this for just about any food.

Tosum up: when you've got dicing to do, do strips, then sticks, then dice. That's the secret of consistency and speed.

Lasts posts

Oven height

When we put a dish or cake in the oven, we naturally tend to put it on the middle shelf, and that's what we usually do. But in some cases, this position and height can be a little tricky, so let's find out why.
October 8^th 20251,8835

The importance of sieving

In recipes that use a fine powder (flour, powdered sugar, etc.), you'll often see the advice to sift before using it. To sift is to pass the powder in question through a sieve (a very fine strainer) before incorporating it into your recipe. It's often advice, but is it really useful?
September 3^rd 20257,0673

The grease spray

As soon as you have something in a recipe that sticks to the mold, the question always arises as to how difficult it is to remove from the mold. There's nothing more frustrating than breaking your cake when unmolding it, because part of it has stuck in the mold. The classic way to avoid this is...
August 26^th 20256,5525

Cake moulds

When we make a cake, or a cake of the same rectangular shape, we usually take out our usual mould and tell ourselves that the recipe is anyway "for a cake", but is it really that simple?
August 25^th 20256,6275

Thinning out herbs

If you need to add a long-stemmed herb (tarragon, mint, verbena, thyme, etc.) to a recipe, you'll probably only need the leaves and not the stem, so you'll need to remove the leaves. Leaf removal means keeping only the beautiful leaves, and eliminating the ugly stems and leaves, but how do you do...
August 8^th 20254,7425

See all posts Random post RSS feeds

Other pages you may also like

Egg yolks and caster sugar

We often come across recipes where we need to mix egg yolks with caster sugar. This would appear to be a very ordinary and simple thing to do but, be warned, these two ingredients can behave oddly together.
February 15^th 201882 K 24.3

Cream and sauces

Have you ever wondered why making beautiful tasty sauces is so easy when you use cream? .
October 15^th 201223 K4.4

Candied fruits: don't get ripped off

Do you like candied fruit? You might like to nibble a handful or add it to a recipe, like a classic fruit cake or delicious Italian specialities like panettone or sicilian epiphany pie.
June 21^th 201766 K 24.2

The beautiful story of the croissants

As you may have already noticed, cooking, baking and pastry-making are full of stories or legends, usually very romantic, about this or that product or recipe. This is often the case for named recipes, for example tarte tatin, peach melba, paris-brest and many others, but it also applies to very...
October 10^th 201819 K5

Baking cakes

Where we see that to put a cake in the oven, once the dough is finished and in its mould, there is no hurry and that the cold is your friend.
June 28^th 201945 K4.1