all right i want to show you how to cut and clean a leek leeks are in the onion family they have a more complex flavor than onions and i really like to use them in soups and when sauteing things in place of onion it gives just a really more complex flavor than just your average onion would so when using leeks you want to clean them really well because there's a lot of sand and grit that gets stuck down in between these layers so usually a leek will come with big long green ends these leaks have already been trimmed we don't want the dark green part anyways if anything you would only pop them in the freezer and save them to make soup or stock later on but to cook with and to eat we only want the white and light green parts so first things first so this is what we have left of the leek the really light green and white part and so the first thing i'm going to do is make a long incision the entire length of the leak and i'm going to go all the way through so now i have cut the leak in half now to really clean it all you need to do is run it under some hot water like see this dirt here and you want to rub all of that off you want to get all of that disgusting dirt out of the leak now you just want to run your leak under the water and separate those layers so that you can get any dirt that has decided to lodge itself down in there these things are growing underground so there's a lot of dirt in there and if you don't take the time to get it out you might have some really sandy soup and we don't want that okay now all we have to do to finish slicing this leak up is to cut it you can either leave it as is or you can make another incision down the length and that will just give you smaller pieces of leak i tend to do that but for this one i think i'll just leave it as is so pretty so clean now ready to cook with