12 Different Ways to Use Your Kitchen Shears
Kitchen shears are one of the most useful items you can have in your kitchen.
Many cooks use kitchen shears to cut out poultry backbones when spatchcocking—and that's it. But kitchen shears are incredibly useful in the kitchen, and they're underutilized by most home cooks. They can replace a chef's knife and a cutting board in numerous circumstances, saving you counter space and dirtying fewer dishes (this is especially useful for reducing the risk of cross contamination with raw meat), and they're the best choice for some jobs you might not be using them for. Here are a dozen tasks where your kitchen shears will prove their mettle.
1. Trimming fat from cuts of meat such as chicken thighs or pork roasts
2. Cutting smaller hunks of raw boneless meats into bite-size pieces
3. Snipping bunches of chives and scallions into short lengths
4. Slicing basil with less bruising
5. Slicing homemade pizzas
6. Chopping whole peeled tomatoes in the can with less mess
7. Trimming the ends from handfuls of green or wax beans
8. Removing florets from heads of broccoli and cauliflower
9. Chopping up sticky dried fruit such as dates or figs
10. Neatly trimming excess pie dough before crimping
11. Snipping through the fat surrounding the loin muscle of pork chops to prevent buckling
12. Stemming and cutting up tough dried chiles
