Rescues · TO SLICE
Soft things are squashed rather than sliced.
Why it happens
A blunt knife, or pushing down instead of drawing. A tomato is the standard test of both.
Recovering it
Uneven slices can be sorted before cooking — put the thick ones in first and add the thin ones later, which costs nothing. Meat sliced the wrong way cannot be re-cut usefully; the fibres are already long. The salvage is to cut those slices again crosswise into shorter pieces, which is not elegant but is genuinely more pleasant to eat.
The mechanism
Two variables do the work. Thickness sets cooking time, because heat travels from the surface inward and the centre is the last place it reaches — halving the thickness roughly quarters the time to heat the middle, so evenness of thickness matters more than the number itself. Direction matters when the food has grain. Meat is bundles of long muscle fibres held in connective tissue; slicing across them shortens each fibre to a few millimetres so the teeth part them easily, while slicing along leaves fibres the full length of the piece and the same meat eats tough. Onions have grain too: cut pole to pole the pieces follow the cell structure and hold together, cut across the equator the cells rupture and the pieces collapse and release more of the sulphur compounds that sting.
The full TO SLICE lesson — how to tell, where to practise it, what it carries to.