Dicing Vegetables, From Easy to Hard

Completely self-taught!

Peppers: Peppers are especially easy, because of their vinyl-like skin. They practically snap apart. All the cookbooks tell you to dice peppers skin down, but that is completely wrong. If you dice peppers facing up, your pepper bits will be stuck together like a shattered windshield. I am not sure why we are instructed to cut peppers facing that way.

Celery: Celery is like peppers, except the tough parts are on the inside. I always dice celery successfully, but about half of my dicing wounds are from celery. Am I doing something wrong, or is it just so easy that I get complacent? This is how most car crashes happen, folks.

Onions: Onions are so hard to cut if you don't know how to do it. On the one hand, they're thoughtfully pre-cut in one dimension (polar co-ordinates), but on the other, they're so slimy and round. Success can be had by leaving the root end intact, then cutting latitudinally along the length of the onion almost to the root end, so the whole thing hangs together, until you chop it in the third dimension. Perfect onions every time.

Garlic: Garlic is too small to dice. Any attempt will just degenerate into hacking at the garlic until it's small enough. "Mincing", they call it. But I'm not fooled.

Carrots: Carrots are a bad shape to cut. The tips are so thin that you don't need to cut them across, but as you go up the carrot, you need to cut it latitudinally into more and more strips. By the time you finish the slicing, all the slices fall apart, and it makes them hard to cross-hatch.

Parsnips: are just like carrots, except with an inedible core. Draw your own conclusions

Beets, turnips, rutabagas: These are very spherical and hard. How difficult they are to dice depends on how much of them you want to salvage. You can probably trim them into cubes and get very even particles out of them. Honestly though, how often do you really have to dice these vegetables? They are not very good.

Tomatoes: You cannot really chop tomatoes. They squish under the knife blade, unless you have a really expensive knife, in which case you have bigger problems than chopping vegetables.

Potatoes: Potatoes are the worst. They're as round as beets, but slimy too. The starchy film they make causes no two potato wedges to stick together long enough to be cut. Your only hope is to rearrange the slices before each cut, like some topography problem. The trouble is that potatoes are hard enough that to cut 10 slices of potato evenly along their length requires a lot of force, which tends to make the knife go awry. It is exhausting to chop potatoes.