The Lazy Cutting Trick That Makes Vegetables Crispier and More Delicious

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say it’s been 25 years since I last cut potatoes into evenly sized cubes. Back then, I was working my first food media job at a fledgling Epicurious and taking cooking classes at Peter Kump’s New York Cooking School, which eventually became the Institute of Culinary Education. The class was called “Techniques of Fine Cooking,” and in addition to flipping a henhouse’s worth of French omelettes, we were required to cut potatoes into perfect squares and carrots into tidy little batons. There were two main reasons for these precision cuts: restaurant-quality looks and even cooking.

I spent the following 20-odd years feeling vaguely guilty about my lazy knife work and irregularly sized produce—until earlier this year, when it dawned on me that sloppy can sometimes be better. It started with our editorial director Daniel’s use of a rustic potato-cutting technique for soups and stews. As he explains, cutting irregular chunks of potato “grandma-style” directly into soups and stews creates delicious ovoid nubbins, and the bits that slough off help thicken the broth. “It’s imperfection, perfected,” as Daniel says.

My knife-skill imposter syndrome faded further when I began developing a recipe for shiitake “bacon”. I’d been making this simple dish of shiitakes seasoned with smoked paprika and salt for years, but had never actually written it down as a shareable recipe. Suddenly, I was thinking about things like the benefits of crowding mushrooms in the pan, ideal cooking temps, precise oil measurements, and the best size for the mushroom pieces. The thing is, shiitakes in a package almost never have the same circumference or thickness, and even if you pick them yourself at the farmers market, they’ll be slightly irregular. That means it’s difficult to cut them into perfectly uniform pieces.

But as I made batch after batch, I realized my sloppy slicing created a beautiful scenario: The larger mushroom pieces turned chewy yet tender, while the smaller ones became incredibly crispy—just like a good meaty piece of bacon.

This idea can be applied to the naturally irregular shapes of many vegetables, producing equally delightful results with broccoli, summer and winter squash, and more. I particularly love the way the tiny bits of cauliflower that fall off during chopping become almost like toasted breadcrumbs when roasted alongside the larger florets.

A bonus to this sloppy cutting is that there’s much less food waste. I still remember how uncomfortable I was in that Peter Kump's class throwing away so much of a potato just to make perfect cubes for roasting. I'm so much happier having less in my compost bin and more crispy bits on my plate.

The one caveat is that there’s a limit to how irregular you can go—tiny pieces can burn while larger ones remain tough—and in some recipes, uniformly cut ingredients are the key to properly even cooking. My advice: Do as I do, and at least sometimes make a half-assed attempt to cut things into similarly sized pieces. That should get you to that place where crispy and tender textures join forces for something perfectly imperfect on the plate.