This book, Mastering Knife Skills, is the result of the author's twenty-three years of contemplation, teaching, speaking, and demonstrating this fundamental and indispensable talent. First, by evaluating the approaches they brought to class, and then by thinking about how to overcome the technical challenges I saw, my students inspired me to codify knife skills practices in a form that could be simply communicated. It was also inspired by the observation that knife skills are rarely addressed in instructional materials like cookbooks, food magazines, or television cooking shows. The audience is assumed to be familiar with basic cooking techniques such as dicing an onion or julienne cutting a carrot. Those of us in the field of public culinary instruction know very well that this is an incorrect assumption to make. Therefore, the focus of the book is on addressing this information gap.