Chop to It

Though they look like the kind of cleavers pit masters might have inmeans “knife for cutting greens.” Nakiris trace their lineage to the seventeenth century, when they were one of two knives commonly found in Japanese home kitchens (the other, a deba, was used for meat and fish). ¶ “Nakiris may be outside the realm of what many Southern cooks are used to, but they’re one of the most utilitarian knives we could use because vegetables are so much a part of Southern cooking,” says Jacqueline Blanchard, a chef who along with her partner, Brandt Cox, returned home from California to New Orleans in 2015 and opened Coutelier, a shop devoted to elegant Japanese culinary knives. ¶ Familiar Western-style chef ’s knives have slightly curved blades that encourage a rocking motion when cutting. A nakiri strikes the cutting board with the full length of the rectangular blade, completely severing every last stringy fiber in a mess of mustard greens. “The motion is more chopping up and down or a draw cut—pulling backward,” Blanchard says. The height of the blade also makes a nakiri easy to use because the entire surface glides through thick squashes or heads of cabbage. ¶ But the real benefit is the confidence a cook can gain from using one. “It’s so much more enjoyable to cook,” Blanchard says, “when you know you have a tool you can count on.”