Food & Recipes, Kitchen Hacks
Kitchen hack: Save your leafy herbs, chop them the right way
How to chop leafy herbs AND keep all that wonderful flavor for your recipe.
Open a recipe and you’ll find a call for a leafy herb – chopped. To be honest, unless you’re just using the herb as garnish (or really know what you’re doing), you always want to chop herbs like basil, parsley, cilantro. That’s the way to release the oils and flavoring into your recipe.
But here’s the problem. Most people tend to over chop their leafy herbs – to the point of mashing all that extra goodness right into the cutting board. You’ve seen it, right? Chop away and, boom, green liquid stains all over the board! Here’s the thing – that green liquid is telling you that a lot of the vital flavor from the herb is NOT going into your recipe but has stayed behind. What do you do?
I’m going to help you rescue your herbs – get more out of what you put in – and I’m going to help you cut back on the amount of prep work. Part of the great reward (other than more flavor for your recipe) is that you’re going to be so happy when you see how easy this is to do the right way.
Basil is one of my favorite herbs – so aromatic and flavorful. But it’s very soft and bruises easily which makes it the one herb so easy to over-chop. This classic French style of preparation is called chiffonade and it’s the right way to not lose all that Basil goodness by leaving it on your cutting board:
- Rinse the Basil and remove each leaf from the stem.
- Roll the leaves tightly together with largest leaf on the bottom – smallest on top – like a small cigar.
- Start at one end and gently slice the “cigar” into thin strips with a very sharp knife. Remember: a sharp knife means “no bruising.” But it also means be very careful. Curl your fingertips in away from the knife blade and keep the knife tip on the board.
- Depending on the recipe, make your cuts no smaller than 1/8th of an inch; 1/4th an inch or slightly larger is fine for most recipes.
- Strips too big? No problem. Cross cut once or twice and now you have smaller pieces. Enjoy that wonderful smell in the process.
Apply the same chiffonade process with any leafy herb like Italian parsley or cilantro. Hold the bunch with one hand and lightly shave off the leaves from the stems. Then roll the little leaves together like the basil and gently cut through them only once. Watch my video and see how it all comes together.
Don’t try this method of preparation with thyme or rosemary – that’ll be for another day. But, if you follow these few easy steps, you will get to enjoy more of your herbs in your recipe.
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