Grandma's Rustic Potato Cutting Trick Is the Secret to the Best Soups and Stews

If I could broadly divide cooks into two camps based on their knife techniques, there are those who primarily work on the board and those who mostly work off it. On-the-board cutting is what we do every time we set an ingredient on a cutting board and chop, dice, slice, smash, or julienne. This approach is common to home cooks and professionals alike, and in skilled hands it is generally how the most precise cuts are made, yielding strips and cubes that have an almost machine-like uniformity.

While some off-the-board methods, such as finely carving an ingredient with a paring knife or sheeting vegetables with a Japanese usuba, require extremely detailed handiwork, most of them are less precise and tend to be more exclusively the domain of home cooks. I like to refer to this kind of cutting as "grandma-style," since I have most often observed it while working on farms in Europe, where family matriarchs would sit or stand over a bowl or pot and rapidly reduce fruits and vegetables to pieces with nothing more than a worn-down paring knife. They were impressive in their speed and skill, but the results were without a doubt more rustic.

The thing is, though, sometimes rustic is right—perfect freaking little brunoise be damned!—and this method of cutting potatoes for soups and stews I'm sharing here is one of my favorite examples of it. I've seen many people do it, but I first became aware of it many years ago while working on a farm in Galicia, Spain. There, Elia, one of the farmers, showed me not only how to do this specific knife cut, but also pointed out why it works so well.

In essence, you hold the potato over your pot (or a bowl of water if you're planning to cut the potatoes and hold them for a while before cooking them) and, using a paring knife, slice and break off irregular chunks. The pieces, while roughly all the same size, should on the whole be wider than they are thick, with edges that are jagged and tapered. It is, counterintuitively, the ideal shape because it's an irregular shape.

The reason this lends itself so well to soups and stews, in particular rustic ones that are hearty and full of long-cooked ingredients that melt into each other, has to do with how those irregular pieces of potato cook in the pot. In my mind's eye, I think of it like a piece of sea glass that started out a broken shard with sharp and pointed edges and sleek facets at odd and random angles. With time, that glass is bumped and scraped by rock and sand as it's pushed via currents and waves, slowly over time chipping, grinding, and wearing down to a beautifully smooth and polished stone.

This process happens to our hand-chunked potato pieces much faster in the soup pot, but the result is the same, little ovoid nubbins of potato worn away by heat and friction. In the pot though, there's an added benefit: Those thinner, irregular edges of potato melt into the broth as they wear away, thickening it gently with their starch to produce a more cohesive whole. Instead of a waterier broth bobbing with little squishy cubes of potato and other vegetables, we get a blended continuum, as if all the ingredients half blurred into each other as they cooked while still maintaining some core, softened remnant of themselves.

It's imperfection, perfected.