Have you ever read a recipe that calls for a minced or diced ingredient? Is your reaction, but how to mince or dice?Look no further, it’s Mother Would Know to the rescue.
To mince or dice simply means to cut into very small pieces. The easiest way to mince or dice a piece of fruit, vegetable, or meat is to make long, thin rod-like pieces, then to cut them horizontally. Typically “minced” pieces are even smaller than diced ones, but the technique is typically the same.
Recipes that call for vegetables such as carrots, celery, and leeks to be cut into small, even pieces generally describe them as diced rather than minced. That’s because it is tough to get them into the truly tiny pieces that “minced” connotes.
The biggest exception to that is garlic. Usually you don’t want pieces of garlic to be apparent in a dish. Therefore, you want to mince them as small as possible.
The photos above show how to mince various vegetables. You can do the same with fruit or pieces of meat.
For more examples of how to mince or dice vegetables, see the recipes for potato salad (minced or finely diced onion), fish with lemon caper sauce (minced parsley), and patriotic composed salad (diced beets and minced shallots).
When recipes call for diced chicken, beef, or pork, they usually mean pieces that are larger than diced vegetables. This diced chicken recipe is a good example. Although it calls for dicing the chicken, the recipe name is “Oven Baked Chicken Bites.”
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