today in our knife skills lesson we are going to learn how to turn something around into something square because a truth dice is an exact cube not a rectangle Oh cute okay so we're gonna do a carrot because that is the most common thing that people have that is round that needs to go into a dice the first thing that you're going to want to do is wash your carrot the reason why is because then once you've trimmed it you can actually use the trim for stock once the carrots washed now we need to cut it into manageable pieces okay we're gonna get rid of anything that doesn't look like we want to eat it but as long as it is not moldy or bad in some way you can put that in your stockpile easily as well now that I've got my ends trimmed up we're gonna cut into manageable size pieces which is approximately two to two and a half inches thanks we're gonna get this cut in two to two and a half inch working pieces so first things that we have to do is cut off the edges okay we need to square it off or else it's never going to end up as a cube so we're going to take our knife and we're going to use the entirety of the blade notice that I slid all the way through it what you'll find is if you go straight down you'll get what I call bell-bottoms okay and you don't want that this is gonna go into our stock pile the reason that most home cooks will not do this is because very wasteful as you can see but if you look under that and put it into your stockpot you're not going to be wasting as much as you would otherwise so now that I've got flat sides if you notice I keep rolling it on to its flat side because we're always looking for flat sides with knife skills because then the product itself won't roll okay so I've got this trimmed up pretty well here and now you can see I've got something square out of something round if I wanted to do a long cooking soup I'm gonna put this in a large piece that there are braids or something like that if I'm wanting to do a stir fry or something that's going to cook very very quickly I'm going to go more towards a small dice which is about a quarter of an inch cubed so if I wanted to go small for example on this one I would maybe cut this in half like this okay there's my planks okay then I would maybe cut this one in half this way now I have sticks and if you notice this is a baton a quarter of an inch cubed by two to two and a half inches long a baton a is what turns into a small dice now I'm going to come along and I'm going to cut my carrots into my dice okay so now I have my small dice carrot we're ready to go something square out of something round