Top 11 Mobile Apps for Learning Knife Skills With Step-By-Step Videos

It’s Tuesday at 9 PM, and I’m in my kitchen holding a chef’s knife that scares me. I’m staring at three bell peppers like they’re a puzzle I can’t figure out.

 This is ridiculous. I’m 29 years old. I have a degree from college. I run social media campaigns for a company that works in the hospitality industry. But I can’t seem to figure out how to cut vegetables the right way.

Let me go back.

I was raised in Orlando by a Colombian family who loved food. My mum could prepare amazing meals like empanadas, bandeja paisa, and ajiaco without any recipes; she just knew how to do it. But she never truly taught me. I would watch her cook, but when I asked her questions, she would answer things like “you add enough salt” or “you cook it until it looks right.” Not useful when you’re trying to learn.

I made it to my late twenties without ever learning how to cook. I could make things hotter. I could put together the ingredients. But what about cooking? Cooking for real? I don’t know.

Then I started dating Marcus approximately eight months ago. He’s one of those people who just knows how to cook. Like, really cook. And all of a sudden, I’m really conscious of how bad I am at cooking. Last week I tried to make stir-fry, but the vegetables were all different sizes—some were enormous chunks and some were small pieces—and they all cooked at different rates. It tasted good, but it was embarrassing.

He didn’t utter a word. But I could tell he saw.

So now I’m attempting to figure things out. And it looks like it starts with knowing how to use a knife, which I don’t know how to do.

Why YouTube Tutorials Made Me More Confused

YouTube was the first thing that came to mind. Of course. That’s where everyone learns everything these days, right?

Not right. Or at least, wrong for me.

I typed “how to cut bell peppers” into Google and received about ten thousand videos. I clicked on one that looked excellent. Before he ever picked up a knife, the guy talked about his new cookbook for four minutes. I went ahead. From a distance where I couldn’t see what his hands were doing, he went through the actual cutting method in about thirty seconds.

Tried a different video. This one took too long, had too much information, and lasted seventeen minutes. I don’t have 17 minutes. I can only pay attention for about five minutes before my mind drifts on to anything else.

It wasn’t better than TikTok. I found some brief knife skill videos, but they were all made for fun, not to teach. Quick cuts, cool music, and someone doing sophisticated knife work that looks cool but doesn’t teach me anything.

I needed something that was organised. Something that would break this down into steps, let me pause and view it again, show me precisely where my hands should be, what angle the knife should be at, and how much pressure to use.

It looks like that item is real. Apps is what it’s called. Apps that are specifically made to teach people how to use knives.

Who would have guessed?

My Search for Apps That Don’t Need Cooking School

I won’t lie: I downloaded around fifteen cooking apps before I found the ones that worked for me. Most of them were either too simple (simply recipes with no instructions on how to do things) or too hard (professional culinary school curriculum that assumed I already knew what “brunoise” meant). No, I don’t. I had to look it up on Google.

But here’s what I kept on my phone:

1. Knife Skills

Knife Skills is literally just that. A knife skills app. It offers brief films, each lasting 2 to 3 minutes, that show how to do different cuts. I also had to Google “chiffonade.” There are slow-motion videos of the cut from several perspectives, with writing on top that explains where the hands should be and safety precautions. I think I’ve seen the “how to dice an onion” video at least twelve times. I’m finally starting to get it.

2. Rouxbe

Someone on Reddit said something about Rouxbe in a thread about learning to cook, and that’s how I found it. It covers more ground, such entire cookery classes instead of just knife skills. But the part on knife skills is very comprehensive. For example, they talk about the physics behind why some cutting motions work better than others. It may sound nerdy, but it helped me figure out what I was doing wrong. I didn’t want to pay the subscription charge ($9.99 per month) at first, but honestly? It’s worth it.

3. America’s Test Kitchen

At first, I only downloaded the America’s Test Kitchen app for recipes, but then I found the “Cooking School” part. They include video courses that show you how to do things step by step. The knife skills module is taught by real chefs who don’t make you feel dumb. They show frequent mistakes, which was quite helpful for me because I was making almost all of them.

4. ChefSteps

ChefSteps has more experimental cooking stuff, but their basic methods portion does a great job of covering knife work. The films are very well filmed, which may seem like a small thing, but it’s important when you want to see exactly what someone’s hands are doing. They also feature a “practice mode” that lets you loop certain parts of a video, which I use all the time.

5. Kitchen Stories

When I first started this adventure, the fact that Kitchen Stories is free was the most important thing to me. There are videos of recipes and tips on how to do things in the app. Their knife skills videos are usually less than 90 seconds long, which is good for my short attention span. They teach the essentials, including how to wield a knife correctly, which I needed, even though it was embarrassing.

Hold on, that’s only five. The title states 11. Let me keep going—

6. MasterClass

MasterClass, listen to me. Yes, it costs a much ($180 a year). But there is a whole part on knife skills in Gordon Ramsay’s culinary class, and hearing him explain it while still being a little scary was… motivating? He makes things really clear, and his intensity makes you pay attention.

7. Tasty

I know this sounds silly, but BuzzFeed’s app now features a “Cooking School” section with videos on how to use knives. They’re made for folks who have never cooked before, which is precisely what I needed. No assumptions about what you already know. They actually start with “this is how you hold a chef’s knife.”

8. SideChef

SideChef features voice-controlled step-by-step cooking instructions, so I can follow along without using my hands. You can learn how to use a knife while preparing something by following along with their knife skills lessons that are built into recipes. That two-part approach worked well for me. It was challenging to learn how to make abstract knife cuts, but learning “how to cut vegetables for this specific stir-fry” felt more real.

9. Epicurious

There are videos on Epicurious that teach you how to use knives. The production quality is quite great, and they show techniques from a number of chefs, which helped me understand that there isn’t just one “right” way to do things.

10. Forks Over Knives

Forks Above Knives I downloaded it because I was in a “maybe I should be vegetarian” phase (it lasted three weeks), but their app includes great knife skills education that focuses on vegetables. It was more useful than apps that specialise on butchering meat because that’s usually what I’m chopping anyhow.

11. Food Network Kitchen

Food Network Kitchen features videos of famous chefs, live workshops, and a good collection of knife skills. The software is a little messy and hard to use, but the “Knife Skills 101” portion has some good lessons. The way Bobby Flay cuts peppers really helped me with my fajita problem.

Okay. That’s 11. Some I use all the time, and some were useful for certain activities but now just sit on my phone. But all together? They have really changed everything.

How Orlando’s tech scene helped me cook better by accident

This is a little out of the blue, but bear with me—

A few weeks ago, I was at a work happy hour and told a coworker how hard it was for me to cook. She told me that her brother works in mobile app development in Orlando. It seems that Orlando is becoming a bigger market for apps, especially those for food and hotels. It makes sense because this city has a lot of tourists and restaurants.

She noted that a lot of the people who build these cooking apps are working with chefs and cooking teachers to make sure the information is correct and easy for beginners to understand. That two-pronged approach is important. A lot of the first culinary applications were built by IT professionals who didn’t know much about cooking or chefs who didn’t know how to make content work on a phone.

But newer apps, especially those made in places like Orlando where there is a lot of overlap between hospitality sector knowledge and tech development, are made for folks like me. People who wish to learn yet become tired of it quickly. People who need things to be explained in very little levels.

That level of detail in the design is what makes the difference between an app I use once and delete and one I actually go back to.

What Happened After Two Months of Using an App Too Much

It’s been about eight weeks since I started this whole “learn how to use a knife properly” thing. And I’m not going to act like I’m a great cook all of a sudden. No, I’m not. I still cut myself from time to time (I learnt the hard way to have bandaids in the kitchen). At best, my julienne is uneven.

But here’s the thing: I’m not afraid of my chef’s knife anymore. I know how to use it. I know where my fingers should be. I know the difference between rocking and cutting. I can cut up an onion without creating a mess or sobbing.

I made those fajitas for Marcus on Thursday. The vegetables were cut into even pieces. Everything cooked at the same time. He noticed this time in a positive way. Asked me if I had been practicing.

Yes. On my phone. At odd times, I was standing in my kitchen. You may learn from applications that cost anywhere from free to $180 a year.

I was interested, so I looked it up, and this survey from the Pew Research Centre says that roughly 73% of adults use their smartphones to find out how to accomplish things they don’t know how to do. It seems that cooking is one of the most popular categories. So I’m not the only one who learns life skills from my phone on a Tuesday night at 9 PM.

The National Restaurant Association also said that cooking at home has gone up by around 35% in the last several years. A lot of that growth is coming from folks in their twenties and thirties who never learned how to cook and are now educating themselves. That’s me, for real.

Things You Should Know About Learning Knife Skills from Apps

This is what I would tell myself if I could go back in time and tell myself something before I started this whole thing:

You’re going to feel dumb. A lot. It’s embarrassing to have someone show you how to hold a knife “properly” when you’re approaching 30. But everyone has to start somewhere, and at least you’re starting in your own kitchen where no one can see you.

Also, and this is very essential, you don’t need all eleven apps. I got obsessed and downloaded everything. But in reality? Choose two or three that work for you and stick with them. I kept going back to Knife Skills, Rouxbe, and Kitchen Stories because they helped me learn in a way that made sense to me.

The way the steps are laid out is more important than how well they are made. Some of the most expensive apps with stunning cinematography were actually less useful than the simple ones that only displayed hand location and cutting motion plainly.

And you’re going to make a mistake. A lot. In the last two months, I’ve probably chopped vegetables wrong three hundred times. If you mess up while learning from an app, you may immediately review the video and figure out what you did wrong.

Where I am now (still learning, not as scared)

It’s Thursday night. In an hour, Marcus will be here. I’m making fajitas again since I thought I should practice the recipe till I can do it without becoming stressed.

I have Kitchen Stories open on my phone and it’s propped up on the counter in case I forget how to cut the peppers. But really? I don’t think I need it anymore. The methods are starting to work.

I’m not very good at using a knife. They probably aren’t even decent by real chef standards. But they work. They are safe. They do what they need to do.

That’s all for now.

Next month, I might work on learning how to cut up a whole chicken the right way. There is certainly an app for that as well.