How to Chop a Carrot – diced carrot

If you haven’t already, please make sure you’re familiar with basic knife safety before starting this tutorial. (link)

Oh look, it’s carrots again! This tutorial is for diced carrot, which is perfect when you want all the flavours in the dish to mix together.

Just like before, start by making sure your carrots are clean and chopping out any discolouration or blemishes.

Next, cut off the top and bottom (or ‘top and tail’) of your carrots.

The next step is to chop each carrot into chunks that are easier to handle, and are a roughly consistent width along their length. You can then deal with each chunk in turn.

 

 

 

 

 

Start by chopping each chunk into long slices about 1cm (half an inch) wide. Depending on the size of the carrot, this could be thirds, halves or quarters.

 

 

 

Continue to cut the chunks into sticks, about 1cm (½ inch) wide. (A little larger than in last month’s tutorial for carrot sticks (link).) If you can, try and avoid breaking them apart for now.

Finally, cut in the other direction, to make little cubes of carrot about 1cm (½ inch) square.

If you’re really looking to save time, you could even try chopping more than one layer of sticks at once! I’d recommend starting with just one and working your way up though.

 

Diced carrot cooks a little faster than slices or sticks, but still takes about 15 minutes to boil, especially if you’re cooking it in a sauce.