Jim Davis: Hi, I'm Jim Davis; I'm going to show you all about Shallots. You know, shallot is like a cross between an onion and garlic. It's primarily French; the French use it almost always instead of onions. It's a very mild flavored, one that lasts a long time in the cooking process.

So today we're going to learn about chopping, mincing and dicing Shallots. Shallots are kind of a combination between an onion and garlic, particularly popular with the French. First I fell off the top, then cut the shallot in half. Then we peel off the outside peel of the shallot, found sometimes as two or three little pieces inside like this. Then we're going to cut slices, through to the back of the shallot and to the bottom of the cutting board but not cut through the back. So it's all held together by the back. We slice off, slices of shallot. Look at there, we have chopped shallots. That's how you chop a shallot.

First we cut off the top and then we cut it in half right through the middle. Peel off the outside peel like that. Lay the shallot down and working crosswise we're going to hold the fingers like a claw, we're going to take our knife and slice very thin slices. Almost always when you're slicing a shallot, you need very thin slices. All rest of these shallots to be sliced very thin. So we use our fingers as a guide and slice off the shallot very thin. And that is how you slice the shallot.

First we cut off the top, then we cut it in half, and we peel off our shallot, and then we make long, thin, very close together cuts, sixteenth of an inch going to the back of the shallot, and all the way to the cutting board, but not through the back. Then we're going to make a horizontal cut in our shallot, and then we're going to slice it very very thin. You know I'm using my fingers as a guide, my knuckle as a guide for that slice, because anything that's in front of that knife gets -- in front of that knuckle gets cut and anything right, it doesn't. So I keep my fingers behind that knife. Now if I need that cut to be just a little finer, then I hold the fingers on my knife and I walk my knife through the shallots, and that makes an even finer minced shallot.