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When you order the crudités at De Maria, the white-hot, all-day NYC café, you’ll notice something peculiar about the vegetables: They’re all shaped like pyramids. Not every pyramidal piece looks the same—some are a bit more obtuse, others slightly more vertical. Uniformity and perfection are not the name of the game here.
The misshapen form of the vegetables is not a kitchen slip-up but rather a very intentional move by chef Camille Becerra. And she’s not the only one adopting this method. At spots across the coast, from plant-filled P.Y.T. to hip Mediterranean joint, Kismet, the veggies look similarly askew in an architectural sort of way. “It just feels less boxed in,” Sara Kramer, a chef/partner of Kismet, says. “The different angles play together, creating something a bit more visually interesting.”
For Becerra, the style wasn’t inspired by aesthetics—at least not initially. The oblique cut is actually a classic technique used in macrobiotic cooking (her guiding theory, which prioritizes balance and wholesomeness), to derive the most nutrients out of an ingredient.
“Cutting something at an angle exposes more surface area, so the vegetables cook faster, take in more flavor, and retain more vitamins,” she explains. “If you’re cutting something straight, only one side is touching the hot pan or pot.”
Becerra liked the look so much that she started applying the oblique cut even to uncooked vegetable dishes (see: the pyramidal crudités), and she now cuts the restaurant’s masa-chickpea fritters and salt cod croquettes into the same sorts of crooked triangles.
“When I’m instructing my cooks, I tell them, ‘You want it to look a little fucked up. That’s the intention.’ And it’s kind of great because every cook has a cool, unique way of doing that asymmetrical cut.”
Becerra recommends two ways that you can replicate this style at home. First, the roll cut: Starting at one end of a vegetable (long ones like zucchini, cucumber, or carrots work best), make a cut at an angle, roll the vegetable slightly, then cut again, at a different angle. Repeat until the whole vegetable is cut.
The second approach is the pyramid cut (which allows you to peel veggies without a peeler): Cut a big hunk off of a vegetable (for this one, fatter, wider vegetables like eggplant or a potato are great), cut one side of the peel off of that hunk, and make angular cuts with your knife into the center of the vegetable—carving out shapes—until all you are left with is the rest of the peel, which you can then discard. Repeat on another hunk until the vegetable is totally cut.
The key, she says, is to not think about it too much. In other words, the wonkier the cut, the, well, edgier the end result.