Keep the convenience but cut out the knife
Recipes make the most of pre-minced or -sliced foods for fresh, timesaving meals
Have you ever pulled out a cutting board and sighed? Ever wished you could skip the chopping and go straight to the cooking? After 26 cookbooks, even the two of us can find knife work a hassle at the end of a busy day.
Perhaps you haven’t taken that knife-skills class on your to-do list, or maybe you haven’t gotten around to buying good knives. Maybe your ability to chop just isn’t what it once was.
Whatever the reason, we have a hunch that such issues have contributed to the explosive growth of dinner-delivery systems such as Blue Apron, Plated and Hello Fresh that provide a box of ingredients.
Let’s face it: Many of us like to cook. And we probably like the honest romance of preparing a meal, a glass of wine or iced tea at hand. We certainly like hot, fresh food on the table. We just don’t want to stand there dicing into the small hours.
That’s why we’ve developed no-chopping recipes that are geared to the wealth of convenience items in your supermarket produce section and freezer aisle.
You’ve probably already seen or used items such as minced garlic and ginger or chopped
“Changing the way we think through recipes helped us modify standard ones into no-knife ones.”
onion, celery, zucchini rounds or fresh stir-fry vegetable blends. Now you can find minced herbs in tubes in the produce section and even frozen chopped basil, a far better flavor boost than its dried version.
For years, some of us have skipped the prep work and shopped at the salad bar, where you can find grain mixtures as well as sliced radishes, beets, cucumbers and more. They’re a little more expensive per pound but less than buying a whole cucumber and having what’s left over go boggy. In the freezer case, there are frozen bell pepper strips, broccoli florets and even artichoke heart quarters, among other options.
We found that changing the way we think through recipes helped us modify standard ones into no-knife ones. For example, frozen vegetables and fruits are often picked closer to ripeness than their fresh kin in the produce department. Those are often picked underripe so they’re sturdier for transport. So the frozen versions can end up sweeter on the plate.
To use them successfully, we have to pump up a dish’s sour, savory or bitter notes. To that end, dried herbs are sometimes the best bet with frozen fare because the herbs have a slight, tealike tang — a little bitter muskiness that’s a better foil to those sweeter bits.
What’s more, frozen vegetables and fruits cook fast. To avoid mush in the pan, we adjusted timings, even the moment when an ingredient is added; sometimes we add them straight from the freezer to the mixture in the pot. Yes, we can make a pretty fine onion soup with frozen, chopped onions. The trick is, we add them twice: upfront for flavor, then later for texture.
At the start of a braise, we often delay adding the frozen bell pepper strips, instead of cooking them earlier with onion and celery. That way, we can preserve the peppers’ texture as well as their slightly grassy flavor. In the same vein, we found that many a soup does better when pre-shredded carrots were added later in the cooking, to preserve their earthy sweetness.
Pre-chopped garlic and ginger are terrific conveniences. Unfortunately, both lose a little spark in their broken-down state. Using more of them and balancing them with some salty notes elsewhere bring the essential flavors back into play. A little salty Parmigiano-Reggiano rind in a soup makes that minced, store-bought garlic pop.
Some convenience items are just better all around. Frozen pearl onions are peeled, which is a real time-saver. They can be tossed into hot fat while they’re still frozen and often end up with better caramelization than their fresh counterparts — and they’ll hold together better in long cooking, such as in our recipe for Arroz con Pollo, in which frozen artichoke hearts (often already quartered) go straight into the pot.
As a rule, when we’re cooking without knives, we’re looking for boneless this or fillet that in our protein choices so they’ll cook more quickly and more efficiently. But they can be a bit, well, dull, so we bring in more complex notes — as in that chicken-and-rice dish — to make up for loss of bones (read: flavor).
All that said, the two of us don’t want to use any ingredient that increases the chemical signature of what we eat. We’re not talking about making “semi-homemade” fare; we want to use the best we can for ourselves and our families. And, of course, you can execute the accompanying recipes with knife in hand. We’ve kept them fairly flexible so they’ll work even with the drudgery of chopping. Another benefit is you can double the recipe if friends drop by or when you want a hearty portion of leftovers for lunches. (Good luck pulling more servings out of a packaged meal box.)
Cooking without knives means you can get a meal on the table with the less-hassle characteristics of a boxed dinner kit, but greater flexibility. And we’re all for that, at the end of a busy day.
Weinstein and Scarbrough are the authors of 26 cookbooks, most recently “A La Mode: 120 Recipes in 60 Pairings” (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2016). Their website is bruceandmark.com, and their podcast is Cooking With Bruce and Mark on iTunes.