You’ve just been invited by your friends to a Chinese/Japanese/Korean lunch, and you just realized you don’t know how to hold chopsticks properly. You panic. But then you grin – you remember AX3 Foodie Fridays’ 5 steps to doing chopsticks right.
You smile, “I got this”.
So what 5 steps are we talking about exactly? Read on to find out:
- Ask your weak hand for assistance in placing the chopsticks correctly in your strong hand: If your weak hand says no, we’re sorry but your strong one is on its own.
- Sit the first chopstick between the thumb and the ring finger: The two main areas of contact are the bottoms of your thumb and the tip of the ring finger as they counteract each other’s push, helping keep the chopstick fixed and immovable.
- Grip the second chopstick with your index finger, middle finger and thumb: This will allow you to have three points of contact with the second chopstick and to grip it firmly. Now you can use this second chopstick almost like a clamp, except only this chopstick should be moving while the first stays fixed in place.
- If you’re making X’s with your chopsticks: Sorry, you just failed, go back and try again.
- So everything else is perfect, but that dim sum is doing the waltz on your chopsticks? Tell it to stop and hold your chopsticks on a 45 degree angle: The angle of attack (or “chopsticking”, if you must) should be at 45 degrees or lower from the table. The lower the degree, the larger the surface area that your dim sum (or other food item) will come into contact with your chopsticks, giving your control of whether that dim sum should be doing the waltz or not.
We hope you will find these steps useful. How do you stop your dim sum or food items from doing the waltz on your chopstick? Share this to your friends and let us know how you use your chopsticks in the comments below!