Chef John Reilly of The Culinary Institute of America demonstrates how to cut and clean leeks, an aromatic vegetable with a flavor somewhat like a mild onion. Because leeks have a number of layers, they're often covered in dirt and sediment, so it's important to wash them thoroughly before cooking with them.
Chef Reilly starts by cutting off the dark green, leafy top of the leek, then cuts the remaining white and pale green stalk into manageable pieces about 4 inches long. He then cuts the pieces in half lengthwise and separates the layers of the leek, putting the pieces into a bowl of water and agitating to remove any dirt. Once the dirt has settled at the bottom of the bowl, he skims the leeks from the top and dries them in a salad spinner.
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Hi, I'm Chef John Reilly from the Culinary Institute of America, and I'm going to show you this kitchen basic: how to cut, clean and wash leeks.
As we look at our leeks, we see they're very interesting in the way that they grow. Leeks grow in the earth. They're nice and white and light down below where the root end is. As you get further up the stalk, they get nice and light and green. As you get further to the top, they get very wide, and the leaves get a little bit thicker; this is the area that gets a lot of sun exposure. The part that we're really interested in is the white and the light green areas.
Since they grow in the earth, there's a lot of dirt associated with this vegetable. The first thing we'll do is cut away our green area up top. Now we cut these stalks into manageable pieces and work them down. What we do from this point is begin to split them. As you can see when we split our first leek in half, there are these wonderful concentric circles that wrap around each other - and that's where the dirt and sediment might lie. There's a wonderful aroma to these, almost like an onion. We continue to work these down and split them in half, and now we're going to wash them.
We put them into a bowl of water, and we want to break them up, we want to separate the leaves and make sure they all break out. We'll agitate our water, stir it, and allow the leeks to float to the surface - and if there's any dirt and sediment, it will go to the bottom. Now we'll just give that a moment, and then carefully skim off the surface, and move our leeks into our salad spinner.
Now we've taken them out of the spinner; they're nice and clean, fresh, and washed. A lot of these will be used for sautéeing, either as a main focus or as a secondary item inside a dish. You'll find that occasionally these will actually be sliced very thin and used in a salad.
This is how we wash and clean our leeks.