Shaping Root Vegetables

In old-fashioned presentations, carrots, turnips, celeriac, and other root vegetables were cut into little balls with a melon bailer or “turned” into elongated shapes. You still might encounter these if you go out to eat in an old-fashioned restaurant in Paris or New York, but nowadays chefs prefer to leave vegetables as unaltered and as natural as possible—this also saves a lot of work. If you find baby turnips and carrots, the turnips don’t need peeling and the carrots just need to be lightly peeled or scraped and left whole with a tiny bit of the green attached. (Michel Guérard started this trend of leaving the greens attached in the early 1970s.) If you’re confronted with larger carrots (or parsnips), peel them, cut them into 2-inch-long [5-cm] sections (or any size you like), and then cut the sections lengthwise into wedge-shaped lengths. The number of wedges you get out of each carrot section will depend on the size of the carrot. If the carrots are thin, you may want only to cut the sections lengthwise in half; if the carrots are very thick, you may want to cut the sections into as many as 5 wedges. Slide a paring knife along each side of the carrot sections between the yellowish core and the surrounding orange. Snap out the cores and discard. I rarely take it further than this, but if you like, turn the vegetables (see below) to give them a slightly elliptical shape. To deal with large turnips, cut them vertically into wedges (you can turn the wedges, if you like) or cut them into sticks—the French call these bâtonnets—by squaring off the edges and cutting the resulting cube into thick slices and then slicing each slice. This is also the way to make perfect dice.