Of Madmen and Cleavers

November 3, 10:03 AMFood ExaminerEric Burkett

Previous Next

1 comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the Food Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

The choice of skilled cooks and madmen everywhere.
Eric Burkett

As I was unpacking some boxes a few weeks ago, I ran across something I had packed at least three years before and – surprisingly – forgotten: my cleaver.

I say surprisingly because once I had unpacked it and began using it again, I remembered all the things I loved about it. Cleavers, despite their association with meat butchery and mass murderers, are actually wonderful kitchen tools, capable of detailed cuts and more than up to the task of fine knife work. In China, the cleaver is the essential kitchen tool and frequently the only knife cooks use.

Mine is a vegetable knife, or cai dao in Chinese, made from stainless steel by the San Han NGA company in Jiangmen, China (the printing on the side of the blade reads “Kongmoon, China” which is the old style for writing the name in English) and is crafted from a single piece of stainless steel. Although it’s considered a vegetable knife, it’s great for slicing, mincing, and chopping meat. A butcher’s cleaver is far heavier and can be used on bones and unsuspecting victims in slasher flicks. The handle, which is an extension of the blade, is smooth and rounded, with four gentle indentations on either side to provide a better grip. The very end of the handle is smooth and rounded, as well. I’ll say more about that a little later on.

What I love most about this cleaver is its weight and balance. The blade is heavy enough that it provides the right amount of force for chopping as well as more detailed knife work, such as mincing and dicing but not so heavy that it simply becomes tiring. Just this weekend, I was preparing a fruit salad and was more than pleased to discover how easily I could use it to slice, peel, and dice a honeydew melon for breakfast. Despite its appearance, the cleaver is a graceful tool and simple to work with.

When I lived at the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown, I often had lunch at one particular dim sum shop on Broadway. If I got there in time, I could watch the cooks in the kitchen from one particular table. Over a background din of tinny, Cantonese radio and rapid fire conversation, they used their cleavers to smear out delicate rounds of dumpling dough to be wrapped around ground pork and shrimp and steamed. They rarely ever seemed to look at what they were doing and I watched, transfixed, as I downed my cheap rice bowl special of steamed short ribs or steamed chicken with ginger.

By coincidence, I’ve been reading “Sharks Fin and Sichuan Pepper,” Fuchsia Dunlop’s memoirs of living in China and she devotes a sizable chunk of text to the cleaver.

Given the complexity of the art of cutting, you might expect the Chinese chef to have a whole armory of fancy knives at his disposal. Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. The instrument of almost all this artistry is the simple cleaver, a hammered blade of carbon steel with a wooden handle and a well-honed edge.

She goes on to note, and I’ll certainly vouch for, the cleaver’s versatility. Besides being able to perform
a range of cuts for which most European style knives are specialized, it performs a wide range of functions. The wide blade can serve as a spatula, easily transferring cut meat and vegetables from cutting board to pan – or wok; the blunt edge opposite the blade is great for tendering tough cuts of meat. And that smooth rounded end I mentioned earlier? It’s good for grinding and crushing dried herbs or spices or anything else, for that matter.

Oh, and while you’re salivating over those expensive “chef’s quality” knives in your favorite kitchen-gadget store (I own enough of them, too, that I know full well the costs), you might take this into account: my cleaver cost me about $15.