By Adam Weiner

Chef Weiner continues his advice for students on knife selection and maintenance. This month: properly using knives.

Over the last two months, these articles were written in handout format for your students regarding how to buy knives/how knives are made, and how to hone and sharpen knives. Again, as a handout, this month’s article is about using knives. Next month, the last part of this series, will be on how to care for knives.

Using Knives
Here’s the bad news: You can’t learn how to use a knife from reading a handout, any more than you can learn how to drive a car by playing a computer game. With that said, there are a number of good Web sites on the subject, such as www.hertzmann.com, particularly, “The Three Aspects of Knife Skills.”

By Adam Weiner

Chef Weiner continues his advice for students on selecting and maintaining knives. This month: the difference between sharpening and honing and the definition of “true.”

Last month’s article was a handout for your students on how to buy knives. This month I am giving you a handout on how to hone and sharpen knives. Next month will be on using knives, and then the fourth article will cover how to care for knives. So, cut out the below and give it to your students as part two of a four-part series on knives:

Many new cooks confuse sharpening knives with honing knives. They are not the same thing. Honing a knife puts the edge back into “true,” while sharpening a knife removes part of the metal and creates a new edge.

If you look under a microscope at a knife, you will see a lot of thin teeth, kind of like one of those cheap plastic combs. Through use and washing, the teeth get pushed out of alignment, out of true. The purpose of the steel is to bring the teeth of the knife back into alignment, back into true. If the end of the teeth becomes dull because of a lot of use or abuse, then aligning it with a steel will not help, and the knife will need to be sharpened instead.

By Adam Weiner

Part 1 of a two-part series from Chef Weiner on advising your students on selecting and maintaining knives.

All culinary students will ask you, at one time or another, about buying knives. Since we are all busy, I thought I would make your life a bit simpler. Just print out the below and give it to your students.

By Adam Weiner

Says Chef Weiner, using firm-cooked sausage to teach the technique of braising can be accomplished within a short class time and brings the concept home to students.

When you think of braising you think of comfort food. From the wafting of the aroma as it cooks and as the plates are carried to the table to its savory down-home “stick to your ribs” flavor, braising has long been popular with families and customers. Pot roast is perhaps the most famous of all braised dishes. For years, osso buco and coq au vin were the most famous restaurant version of braising. Nowadays short ribs seem to have taken their place.

By Adam Weiner

Says Chef Weiner, with summer here, it’s time to look at your curriculum, look at your syllabus, look at your lesson plans, and see what you can do to make sure you teach the basics your students need to get and keep a job.

My program runs year 'round. I have new students starting and senior students graduating every month. I envy my friends whose classes have summer breaks. It would be great to have some off time to review what happened in the previous class term: what went well, and what needed improvement. I would then take these points and modify my course curriculum, changing what didn’t work, and strengthen what did.