{"id":640,"date":"2002-07-25T16:58:01","date_gmt":"2002-07-25T16:58:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/?p=640"},"modified":"2020-08-19T16:58:24","modified_gmt":"2020-08-19T16:58:24","slug":"a-trick-to-dice-tomatoes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/2002\/07\/25\/a-trick-to-dice-tomatoes\/","title":{"rendered":"A trick to dice tomatoes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>This evening I discovered the trick to dicing fresh tomatoes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m sure every chef worth his or her salt shaker learns this on day one, but for some reason up until now I either put up with tomato skin in my dishes or used canned tomatoes instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m sure it was one of Alton Brown&#8217;s shows that tipped the scale &#8211; that, and getting disciplined about using the knife sharpener on our blades before prepping the ingredients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If you don&#8217;t have a sharp paring knife, you can forget using this technique. It doesn&#8217;t have to be super-razor-sharp, but dull just doesn&#8217;t cut it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\"><li>Using a sharp paring knife, take your tomato and half it, down the axis, just like you would if you were halving an apple.<\/li><li>Cut each half into four or more segments, whatever is optimum to keep the juices from leaking.<\/li><li>Take a segment, and hold it on the cutting board so that it is positioned upright on the stalk end, like a half-moon, with the skin side away from the knife.<\/li><li>Cut away any pithy white part remaining at bottom end of the wedge, but be careful not to cut right through to the cutting board.<\/li><li>Continuing the knife stroke, pressing the knife blade flat against the cutting board, but with the sharp edge raised slightly. (Imagine you were spreading butter on a slice of bread with the dull edge of the blade.)<\/li><li>Draw the blade across the cutting board (spreading the butter) and at the same time, roll the tomato segment away from the knife edge so that the cutting board forms a tangent with the curve of the tomato, the cutting edge being the point of intersection.<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>If the blade is sharpish, you won&#8217;t need any back-and-forth cutting motion, just slide that knife across the board, rolling the segment as you go. The newly separated tomato skin acts as a slippery surface for the knife to scoot along on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It will take a little practice, but it&#8217;s great fun to flick those transparent tomato skins into the trash.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Knife Skills! Allright!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This evening I discovered the trick to dicing fresh tomatoes. I&#8217;m sure every chef worth his or her salt shaker learns this on day one, but for some reason up until now I either put up with tomato skin in my dishes or used canned tomatoes instead. I&#8217;m sure it was one of Alton Brown&#8217;s [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-diary","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/640\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spacefold.com\/colin\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}