I Can’t Stop Julienning With This $10 Peeler
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I consider myself a very proficient home cook. I can riff, I can pivot, I can invent. I have an understanding of all basic and some not-so-basic techniques, and I don’t break a sweat when I have to feed a crowd. But one area where I’m not themostconfident is my knife skills. Yes, I know how to wield a blade safely (arguably the most important thing). And sure, I can cut decently well.
But I’m not as quick, limber, or precise as the pros. And there is one style that, until relatively recently, was not something I tried to tackle at all: the julienne, which is short, thin strips, usually about an eighth of an inch wide.
Even slices — thick or thin — are easy enough with practice. When rough chopping, whether fine or coarse, I can hack away without worry of being too precious. Even a dice is quite simple. But a julienne requires extreme consistency, often out of unusual shapes. Think about it: When dicing a carrot, it’s easy enough to get relatively equal-size chunks from top to bottom. But carving those thin planks out of a cylindrical(ish) vegetable that generally starts wide and then tapers into a finer point is just plain annoying.
My solution for a long time? Just avoid it as much as possible.
Then, a few years ago, I was chatting with chef and cookbook authorJess Damuck. Before she developed her own recipes, she was a food stylist — not the kind who uses nonedible techniques like glue but the kind who simply knows how to cook well while keeping aesthetics top of mind. Still, she had a couple of tricks of the trade that don’t just make dishes look beautiful but translate to efficiency in the kitchen.
At the time of our conversation, we were focused on a tool she loves forstripping the leaves off of hearty greens and herbs. But she offhandedly mentioned another one of her favorites: OXO’s julienne peeler. Indeed, she recommends it in the tools section of her first book. “It feels like I’m giving away a hard-earned food-stylist secret,” she writes, “but [it] makes the most beautiful long, even, and slightly curved julienned vegetables.”
Considering my history, I was intrigued, so I pulled it up on my computer and bought it right away. Since then, I’ve come to appreciate it more than I expected.
Now, I pull it out all summer long to add carrots to my slaw, a staple at backyard barbecues. I also like it for carrots shredded into a regular weeknight green salad. Carrots — as evidenced by my examples thus far — get the most julienning in my house. But I’ve also used it for zucchini salads. You can make the strips long like zoodles, an unfortunate trend to replace noodles back in the 2010s, but a delightful shape in its own right. Or you can make your lengths shorter, like matches. In the winter, I’ve julienned daikon and other root vegetables I find at the farmers’ market for quick pickles to brighten braises and stews. It’s faster than cutting by hand, for sure; it looks better; and a more unexpected plus is that such a uniform texture is delightful to eat. While not an everyday tool, it’s an occasional time-saver — and dish enhancer — that’s very much worth it in my book.
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