Up until recently, I was using a cleaver all wrong. Not for chopping, but when attempting to cut through something hard and dense.

 

As though splitting firewood, I would hold the cleaver with both hands out in front of me and, with legs slightly spread for stability, whale down on my intended target, such as the middle of a large butternut squash.

 

My feeble attempts were seldom effective (about as effective as my wood splitting efforts), and what was worse is that the cleaver would usually get stuck in the squash. At those moments I would solicit the aid of the man of the house who could finish the job, sometimes with half a squash flying off the counter.

 

There had to be a better way, a less perilous way, but I had no idea what it could be. The way, it turns out, lies in professional butchery practices.

 

A couple of months ago I took a “Tools of Butchery” workshop taught by Jaclyn Burskey, an instructor of whole animal butchery, as well as meat processing, and the butcher and production manager at Vermont Salumi.

 

Jaclyn demonstrated how butchers use cleavers to cut through small bones, such as vertebrae. Setting the cleaver right where she wants to make a cut, she picks up a mallet with her other hand and, here’s the genius part, whacks the top of the knife with the mallet. It’s precise, safe, and effective.

 

To be honest, I haven’t tried the cleaver-and-mallet method on a butternut squash, but I’ve been using it a lot the last several weeks to cut through frozen packages of ground pork.

 

Where I live, in Vermont, good quality, locally raised meat is usually available frozen, not fresh—and not in small Chinese-stir-fry-sized amounts.

 

As I cook my way through the recipes in the current DCCC pick, The Breath of a Wok by Grace Young, the cleaver and mallet technique has come in very handy. Rather than have to defrost an entire 1-pound package of ground pork, I can cut off just what I need for the recipe (usually 4 ounces). Why the focus on ground pork? Because I love the combination of tofu and ground pork in Chinese cooking, the dish Ma Po Tofu being one of the most famous examples. Happily there are several delicious tofu-and-ground-pork combos in The Breath of a Wok, giving me lots of chances to have fun with my cleaver and mallet.