Category: Prep

How to dice a carrot

To finish up, dicing. I find this always looks like a lot of manual work has been done but it’s really not that hard.

Diced carrot cooks a lot quicker as it’s smaller in size so can be handy if you’re in a rush, though you should never rush good food!


To start with cut the carrot julienne into sticks, then just bunch them together and slice to get a dice, the finer the julienne the smaller the dice will be.

slice and dice

So there you have it.

Hopefully this guide will speed up your carrot prep!

Keep an eye out for more prep guides and recipes coming soon.

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Slicing carrots, whole, halves and quarters

Probably the most common way of cutting a carrot, slicing is a quick and easy way to prep a carrot.


Make sure your knife is nice and sharp as carrots are fairly dense. Lay the carrot flat on the chopping board and hold the large end with your hand and put the tip of the knife on the board and slice along the carrot.

For halves, simply cut it in half, for quarters cut a half in half.

Wholes, halves and quarters

You can also cut them at a 45° angle for a slightly fancier effect.

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Prep guide: How to prep carrots

The Welsh for carrot is a moron, which is funny, but I like to eat them.


Vivid orange and natural sweetness are the first things that come to mind, but knowing how to prepare one (or 1000) is always a good thing to learn!

In this guide I’ll cover;

You can grate them too, like in coleslaw, but that’s pretty self explanatory (I hope?)

Let’s get to it!

How to peel a carrot

Before getting a knife involved (unless you peel it with a knife) you need to get the skin off.

When I’m making soups or stocks I leave the skin on, and sometimes when roasting, but otherwise I’d generally advise to peel before prepping.

The Best bit of equipment for this is the trusty speed peeler, but any veg peeler (should) work. You can use a knife, but you’ll probably lose a lot more carrot unless you scrape the skins off rather than slicing them off.

You spin me root (vegetable) round baby, right round

Anyway! First thing to do is hold a carrot and get the hang of spinning it round 360° in your hand, like this;

1.spinny roundy carrot

You don’t have to practise this, but it’s easier if you get the hang of it first, rather than dropping the carrot all the time while you try to peel it.

Time to peel

Now get your peeler and peel from top to bottom, turning the carrot about 20-30° as the peeler reaches the bottom, return to the top and repeat around the whole carrot. Be sure to hold it firm enough as you peel, or you’ll drop it.

2.peel and turn, peel and turn..

Top and tail

Now to top and tail, which simply means cutting the ends off (the top and the tail) now we have a carrot ready to prep 🥕

3.top & tail
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How to cut an onion; mincing


Just generally mincing about really

Mincing is close to grating, but the onion retains a lot more moisture when mincing. It’s basically cutting it up really really fine so WTF! (Watch Those Fingers)

Start by finely dicing an onion.

Then all you need to do is finely chop it up.

Chop chop chop and chop some more

“My local spring onions have started singing hip hop. The little rap scallions.”

So there you have it, the most commonly used way of prepping an onion.

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More to come soon!

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How to cut an onion; dicing


My favourite way to cut an onion

I like this the most because i think diced onion brings out the best flavour, also it cooks the fastest as the onion is cut into smaller pieces.

Start by taking half of a peeled onion and lay it flat side down on a chopping board.

Use the lines on the onion as a rough guide

If you look at the onion you should see faint lines from the root to the top of the onion, use these as a rough guide to slide along the onion, stay as close to the root as you can.

Try and cut as close to the root as you can

Turn the onion 90° and proceed to cut as you would if you were slicing it lengthways.

Slice the onion lengthways

Et voila! The result is a pile of lovely diced onion.

Onion, in all it’s glory.

Finely diced onion

This is pretty much the same process as above, but before dicing make 2 incisions into the onion sideways (keep the onion on the chopping board, i only picked it up to demonstrate)

Make 2 or 3 incisions in the onion sideways
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How to cut an onion; slicing (lengthways)

When slicing with a knife, rest the blade against your knuckles and WTF (Watch Those Fingers!)


Start by taking half of a peeled onion

When slicing, try to not let your fingers stick out and instead use your knuckles to rest the knife against.

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Rest the knife on your knuckles when slicing

Use the knife to slice vertically down the onion, as you cut the onion the weight of the knife should push through it. Try to not cut too aggressively or fast until you’ve got the hang of it. As you slice the tip of the blade should stay in contact with the chopping board. Notice how the knife rests on my knuckle while slicing, keeping the fingertips safe.

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Slice vertically keeping the tip of the blade in contact with the chopping board, knife blade resting on knuckles

This will result in semi-circle strands of onion and is probably the most commonly used method of slicing an onion. For smaller, quarter circle strands just cut the onion on half through the root again.

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Semi-circle slices of onion

Try to keep the spacing between slices the same so the onion is all roughly the same size (unless cutting for something that will get blitzed i.e soup, curry etc). This is so it all cooks at a similar rate and you don’t end up with raw bits of onion and overcooked bits of onion in the same dish.

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How to peel an onion


How to peel an onion for use straight away (10-20 seconds)

1.Cut the top off the onion (not the root)

The top of the onion is the stringly top bits of skin, slice about 2-3cm down from here until you can remove it like a little hat.

1. Remove the top of the onion

2.Cut the onion in half

Put the onion flat side down and cut in half directly through the root.

2.Cut the onion in half

3.Remove the skin (peel)

Start in the corners and peel away down to the root, it should come away easily enough but the skins can stick sometimes. Either use a knife blade to get under it or if it’s being really stubborn just remove the next layer of onion.

3.Remove the skin from the onion

4. Tidy up

Half of a peeled onion

Check the later of skin around each half of the onion, if it looks like it’s dry or slightly brown/discoloured then peel it down to the next layer.

It should look nice and shiny.

How to peel an onion for later use (10-20 seconds)

1.Peel the onion

With a small knife make a small incision to the top of the onion through any loose skin and as you peel away move diagonally around the onion.

Be sure to not cut through or remove the root, it needs to stay in tact to keep the onion as fresh as possible

Peeling a whole onion with a knife

2. Tidy up

A whole onion, free from its skin

As above remove any unpleasant looking layers of onion and store in the fridge for upto 2 weeks or they look and/or smell nasty.

Now it’s peeled onto the slicey part.

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How to prep/cut an onion like a pro, with plenty of gifs


Peel and chop, peel and chop..

The humble onion, bringing mankind to tears since it’s existence. Possibly one of my favourite, or at least most commonly used ingredients.

There is so much you can do with an onion, as i’ll show in later recipe posts, and knowing how to cut an onion properly can save a lot of time and stress. I would say on average i probably peel, slice,dice and cut up around 10-15 onions a day; for the last 15 years (!) so i guess i’ve got a bit of experience when it comes to prepping and advice on how to cut an onion properly.

How to cut an onion

I find that far too often i’ve been asked how to cut an onion, or i’ve witnessed someone trying to cut an onion when they clearly have no idea how to cut an onion (it can be quite painful to watch but then if you’ve never been taught, you don’t know!) so here is a complete guide on how to cut an onion.

It goes without saying that a nice sharp knife is a big advantage when figuring out how to cut an onion (check this post on how to keep your knives in good check). Always WTF! (Watch Those Fingers!) because its not fun when you bleed on everything for 2 and a half hours.

When it comes to onions remember the skins go nicely in a stock (if you’ve got one on the go) so just chuck them in the stockpot rather than the bin. In terms of prep there’s 5 (or 6) basic ways to prepare and cut an onion.

These consist of;

I’ll go into each one separately.

But first things first, you need to remove the aforementioned skin (stock it!) to get to the fleshy, oniony goodness.

How to peel an onion

How to peel an onion? There are 2 ways (that i know of) that work best, one for when you need to use the onion straight away, and one for when you want the onion kept whole but with no skin (i.e for service or an event/party etc.).

When storing onion that are not cut up but have been peeled be sure to keep them in the fridge.

If you’ve heard or read anywhere than keeping sliced/diced/cut up onion in the fridge is dangerous then i can tell you now that i’ve been doing it my entire cooking career, and have been taught to do it by others, though it only lasts around 3 days i have never experienced any kind of problem (health or otherwise) storing cut up onion in the fridge, just keep it in an air tight container.

It can save you a lot of time (or what seems like a lot) if you just prep all your onion at onces (i.e a 2.5kg bag from the supermarket), thought just remember if you want to pre slice it to not do too much due to the shelf life.

Buying pre prepared vegetables, especially onions from supermarkets is more of a waste of your money than you think, to put it into perspective a bit, 1kg of sliced red onions from tesco comes in at £5.56/kg! You can get frozen sliced red onion at £2/kg but come on, frozen raw onions? We want nutrients from our food! Anyway to compare with the alternative, fresh, crisp, flavoursome red onions they cost a grand total of £1/kg.

I don’t know about you, but if you either look in the long term, or in terms of scaling up it’s a gigantic saving, for what is quite honestly 5 minutes work, possibly 10 if that.

Apologies for the rambling i just hate so see money wasted, especially on food. Eating well really doesn’t have to be expensive if you know how to get the most from your ingredients which i will (hopefully) help you realise!

On to the actual point i was trying to make, to peel an onion you need;

  • A knife, or something sharp
  • A chopping board, preferably not the floor

You can just do it with your hands, but assuming you want to slice or dice it after them i’m afraid they won’t work for that, and we have knives for a reason.

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How to sharpen a knife properly


(Or at least to the best of my knowledge )

Over the years I’ve seen many techniques for sharpening knives, from small minuscule grinds on every section of the blade to what can only be described as abusing knives.

If you didn’t already know the most common tool for sharpening a knife is called a steel, which funnily enough is a piece of strep used to grind the blade of a knife back to sharpness.

There’s literally thousand of types of steel (the metal) and a hell of a lot of types of steel for sharpening knives and I’m not here to list them, but this https://www.bladehq.com/cat–Steel-Types–332 is quite informative if you’d like to know.

Other than steels I’ve seen a few other things used before including other knife blades (best to use old unused ones if you have to resort to it) and sandpaper which my current head chef uses to great effect on serrated knives, starting with the coarse grit and getting finer.

Anyway, a sharp knife is pretty important to cook efficiently so onto the sharpening!

I don’t know if any of the terms I’m going to use are right, or if this is even the best way to sharpen a knife but it’s always worked well for me.

  1. Take a steel run it under a cold tap just to get it wet or run the knife under water instead.
  2. Put a fist in front of you like you’re doing a thumbs up, you want to hold the steel with your thumb on the top and the rest of your fingers supporting the grip with the steel facing downwards.
  3. Take the knife and try to get it at about a 20° angle to the steel.
  4. Now you want to do an up and down grinding motion, kind of circular for about 8 rotations, the knife blade shouldn’t leave the steel.
  5. Repeat the grinding on the other side of the blade, with the other side of the steel (right or left depending where you started)
  6. Then return to the original side of the blade you were working and place the heel of the knife (bit of the blade closest to your hand as you hold it) and run the blade down the steel like you’re slicing, as the blade travels down pull the knife back towards you so as the blade reaches the bottom of the steel the tip should be the last bit touching before contact is broken with the steel.
  7. Do the same thing again on the other side of the blade, the repeat one side after the other for about 7-8 downward slices against the steel.
  8. Wipe the steel and knife clean and get choppy choppy.

Safety first!

I know it goes without saying really, but I’ve worked in kitchens for 15 years now and I still make mistakes now and then, I personally find cuts a lot worse than burns as it makes it a lot harder to keep cooking when you’re bleeding everywhere!

If you’re using knives around other people then don’t let them distract you, either put the knife down to talk to them or don’t take focus off what you’re doing because that’s all it takes.

Another thing I’ve seen quite often is people cutting themselves up because they’re trying to be fancy with the steel and go 200 mph.

Not only can you wreck your fingers and forearms (trust me I’ve done it before 😂) but it’s not the best way to sharpen a knife either (fast), it’s more important to try and keep the blade at a constant angle rather than go as fast as you can just to be cool.

I will get round to uploading some pictures to assist with the technique, my steels are always at work.