Chef Reveals How You Can Safely Chop Tiny Vegetables Using Just Two Common Household Items

Cooking is an art that mirrors the most intimate place of the human heart: emotion. A meal cooked well satiates more than just the belly; it gratifies the soul and maybe what lies beyond. But one task in cooking, which seems Sisyphean to many cooks: the delicate knifework. Knifework, too, is an art. The sharp metallic edge of the knife rocks back and forth, assaulting the vegetable with poses like slicing, mincing, chiffonading, dicing, chopping, and julienning it, ultimately transforming it into shapes and sizes that would add to the pleasure of those who eat the cooked dish. But the task becomes challenging in the case of small-sized vegetables as the knife has too little area to carry out its cutting dance.

In one video that has been making rounds on social media, a chef brought attention to chopping these tiny vegetables. Anatolii Dobrovolskyi (@dobrovolskyi_hchef), Brand Chef at Café SOFi in Benidorm, Spain, shared an ingenious trick for chopping tiny vegetables. The hack, he mentioned, came originally from the creative trunk of an Indian homemaker. The hack doesn’t require you to become Ratatouille’s Linguini and seek help from a mouse who sat on his head and pulled the strands of his hair to teach him how to chop the veggies. Instead, this one is rooted in common sense and lots of laughter.

The video begins with a stitched clip from an Indian food blogger, Sangita’s Kitchen (@sangita_kitchen3). In this clip, the woman shared a “ninja technique” to chop green chillies, using just a rubber band, an ice cream stick, and a knife. First, the woman pressed the ice cream stick to her thumb, then rolled a rubber band around it so the stick would adhere to her hand. She picked up one green chilli from a plate, pressed it to the ice cream stick, and started chopping it with a kitchen knife.

While the chilli remained latched to the stick, the knife quickly chopped it into teeny-weeny bits. The stick, in this case, added to the cutting speed plus protected the finger from coming in contact with the blade of the knife. Each time the knife attacked the chilli and the cut-out chilli dropped down, the knife hit the stick. Without the stick tied there as a guardian, the knife would have ended up hitting the thumb instead.

Inspired by this woman, Dobrovolskyi went on to try her trick in his own kitchen. He walked over to his refrigerator and pulled out a packet containing several red chillies. From a kitchen tap, he unspooled a green rubber band and from a supply bag, took out a packet of ice cream sticks. Mimicking what the woman did in the video, he repeated the entire activity and ended up with chopped chillies. He looked at the camera with eyes popping wide open and a guffaw bursting from his mouth. “Struggling to chop tiny veggies without a trip to the ER? Tried this hack, and let’s just say it was an adventure,” Dobrovolskyi captioned the video.

The video became an instant hit among both the Indians as well as Westerners, many of whom flocked down into the comments section to express amazement. 08kiranahire said, “Indian moms have been doing this for ages for every veggie, and without the wooden stick!” @mukeshprajapati1553, quipped, “This technique got out!” @umm_ritt_sunar said the trick is for the time when “you don’t have a chopboard.” Another Instagrammer, @monki_d_rufi, commented, “Someday I will make this machine.” 

You can follow Anatolii Dobrovolskyi (@dobrovolskyi_hchef) and Sangita’s Kitchen (@sangita_kitchen3) on Instagram for recipes and cooking hacks.