Dicing is a culinary knife cut

Culinary knife cuts

There are a number of regular knife cuts that are basic to chef skills. Each produces a standardized piece of food, allowing a chef to translate words into cuisine....

 in which the food

Food

Food is any substance consumed to provide nutritional support for the body. It is usually of plant or animal origin, and contains essential nutrients, such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals...

 item is cut into small blocks or dice

Dice

A die is a small throwable object with multiple resting positions, used for generating random numbers...

. This may be done for aesthetic reasons or to create uniformly sized pieces to ensure even cooking

Cooking

Cooking is the process of preparing food by use of heat. Cooking techniques and ingredients vary widely across the world, reflecting unique environmental, economic, and cultural traditions. Cooks themselves also vary widely in skill and training...

. Dicing is a desirable method of food preparation, due to the small nature of the pieces of food, which allows the spread of flavour and texture throughout the dish, as well as a somewhat faster cooking speed.

Technically there are three types of dicing: large, medium, and small. Large is usually a 20mm (3/4 inch) cube, medium 10mm (1/2 in.), and small 5mm (1/4 in.) However, in home cooking most people understand dicing to just be any size cube, often the size of a regular set of game dice. Brunoise

Brunoise

Brunoise is a culinary knife cut in which the food item is first julienned and then turned a quarter turn and diced again, producing cubes of a side length of about 3 mm or less on each side or 1/6 inch cubes. In France, a "brunoise" cut is smaller, 1 to 2 mm on each side. Common items to be...

 is an especially small size, produced from further cutting of julienne

Julienning

Julienne is a culinary knife cut in which the food item is cut into long thin strips, not unlike matchsticks. Sometimes called 'shoe string', e.g. 'shoestring fries'...

-style food.

Dicing usually applies to vegetable

Vegetable

The noun vegetable usually means an edible plant or part of a plant other than a sweet fruit or seed. This typically means the leaf, stem, or root of a plant....

s prepared in this way but it can also apply to the preparation of meat

Meat

Meat is animal flesh that is used as food. Most often, this means the skeletal muscle and associated fat and other tissues, but it may also describe other edible tissues such as organs and offal...

 or fish

Fish

Fish are a paraphyletic group of organisms that consist of all gill-bearing aquatic vertebrate animals that lack limbs with digits. Included in this definition are the living hagfish, lampreys, and cartilaginous and bony fish, as well as various extinct related groups...

.

See also

• Russian salad
  Russian salad
  Salade Olivier is a salad composed of diced potatoes, vegetables and meats bound in mayonnaise. The salad is usually called Russian salad in Western European and Latin American countries, and Salad Olivieh in Iranian cooking.-History:...
  
   and macédoine de légumes
  Macedonia (food)
  Macedonia or macédoine is a salad composed of small pieces of fruit or vegetables.Fruit Macedonia or Macedonia de frutas is a fruit salad and is a common dessert in Spain, France, Italy and Latin America....
  
  , foods based on cooked diced vegetables.