How to Chop a Cucumber

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

Although it’s mostly been hidden behind rain clouds today, the summer sun has arrived here in England! With hotter weather comes the desire for more refreshing foods like salads and sandwiches. One of my favourite ingredients for both is cucumber.

Cucumber has dark green skin, paler green flesh and translucent seeds in the middle. You can basically eat the whole thing but the end parts of the cucumber, which don’t have any seeds in, are often a bit bitter. (I usually chop off the ends and feed them to my guinea pigs!)

Depending on what you want to use your cucumber for, you may want to cut it into slices, sticks, or cubes.

Slices of cucumber are best for sandwiches, and they’re very straightforward to cut. Simply work from one end of the cucumber, cutting off slices as thin or as thick as you like! Although, if you are going to use them in sandwiches, I’d recommend slices thinner than ½ cm (¼ inch).

Sticks of cucumber are perfect for finger food. I especially like them with some fresh hummus. To cut a cucumber into sticks, start by chopping off a chunk of cucumber the same length as you want your sticks. (You may remember this method from my post on carrot sticks here.) Then just keep halving until your cucumber sticks are as thin as you like.

Cubes of cucumber are perfect for mixing into salads. You can also use slices, but I personally think cubes let you mix all the ingredients together better. You can cut cubes of cucumber from either slices or sticks, but my favourite is using a sort of grid pattern like we did for diced carrot (link). This is the fastest way of cutting cubes I’ve found.

Start with a chunk of cucumber like for sticks, and cut it into long, thick slices as in the picture below.

Cut each thick slice into sticks, then into cubes about 1cm (½ inch) square. Try and hold the sticks together for faster cutting.

And there you have it! How to chop a cucumber, for all your summer dishes!

How to Chop a Carrot – into sticks

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

We’ve already done a few How to Chop a Carrot tutorials, but carrots really do feature in almost every meal I cook, so bear with me! They’re also a great vegetable to practice on, because they’re inexpensive and can be eaten both raw and cooked. In today’s tutorial we’ll be making carrot sticks.

The first few steps are the same as we’ve learned so far. Wash your carrot with clean water (and a scrubbing brush if you want), but try and leave the skin on to preserve the mineral content.

Check your carrots over for any discolouration or blemishes that you want to cut out. Just like before, cut them out using a small ‘V’ shape.

Chop off the top and bottom (or top and tail) of your carrots.

Next, cut the carrot into chunks the same length as the sticks you want to end up with. I usually aim for about 4-5cm or so (a little under 2 inches).

 

 

 

 

With each chunk, start by chopping it in half. This gives you a flat surface to rest the carrot on, which makes the rest of the chopping safer. There are a couple of different ways to go from here.

 

 

 

 

The way I always used to make carrot sticks is to just keep halving until you end up with sticks that are about half a centimetre (¼ inch) at the fat end.

Recently I’ve found, however, that it’s more efficient to cut carrot sticks using a kind of grid pattern. Slice each chunk into four lengthwise, then cut each thick slice into sticks. You can even stack your slices to make chopping faster!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Not only are sticks great finger food, you can also boil them like slices (link). However, my favourite way to cook carrot sticks is in a stir-fry, which is the recipe we’re working towards this month!