Several weeks ago, for some reason (Nina Burgess doesn't know, but its her fault), I started reviewing my kitchen knife technique, mostly from reading and watching several good youtube videos on the subject.
One thing led to another, and in my obsessive way I found myself researching chef's knives - in this case, 8" chef's knives. Now, we have a very excellent set of knives indeed (some Henckels 4-star knives my wife claims I married her to get...) - but the chef's knife was only 6", which while good for my wife with her smaller hands, was a bit small for me when I started holding the knife correctly (which actually has your thumb and forefinger over the blade and not the handle). So... open the search for a knife. This I obsessed over for a while, and finally decided on a knife that works for me at an affordable cost, yet which can work well with my wife's high-bred knives. This blog is about the conclusions I am starting to come to after reflection. Consider it FWIW.
Knives are one of those product areas that you can spend from very little (buy them at your local supermarket) to a whole lot, over $200 per knife. In such a market, the term "you get what you pay for" is only somewhat true. I feel the price vs. quality curve is monotonically increasing, but there is probably quite a "knee to the curve", and there are some good deals out there to be had. Let's think about the process of finding that knee.
First - romance put aside (and knives, often being wedding presents have lots of romance associated with them), a knife is a knife. They are all sharp, and they all cut - most of them quite well. So we are already to the second or third order effects before we have even started.
As I see it, the things worth considering are:
- The overall type of knife (chef's knife, carving, paring, etc) - I'm not considering that here.
- The material of the knife. Most people use stainless for obvious reasons, even if traditional iron may cut better. Within stainless there seems to be several grades and hardnesses. At the lower end of the market are the somewhat softer steels. This does not make the knife bad. If the quality of the softer steel is good, it means you will have a knife that is easy to sharpen, but will have to be sharpened more often. For example, I have a number of Chicago Cutlery knives that are very sharp, and very satisfying to sharpen - but... they need to be sharpened (I'm not counting steeling) every 50 uses or so. On the other end of the spectrum are the wonderfully tempered steel knives - such as the Henckels we own. These have a totally different "feel" to them when you use a steel - it feels slipperier and much, much harder. When sharpening or steeling them, they need much more work, and IMHO it is actually harder to get a good edge on them. But.. once you do, it lasts a long time. It is no surprise that professional cooks as a result always favor these knives - and hence why the "professional" knives are also the expensive knives, generally speaking. They also often have someone else sharpen them.
- For a given type (say, Chef's knife) - the blade profile (the "normal" or long way). With some knifes, such as carving knives, this is a non-topic - they are straight. With chef's knives, you have both French and German profiles. And then the Japanese knives are totally different, much straighter. This is a preference thing - and can be easily researched on the internet, so I won't discuss it here.
- Straight or serrated - my opinion, forget serrated, expect probably bread knifes. Period.
- Blade construction -forged or stamped. No doubt, forged is the standard, and the most expensive. It results in a shaped, tapered blade that usually goes fully through the handle. On the other hand, it is not always necessary for a very well-working knife. Once example would be the Victorinox chef's knife, which is stamped, but... gets great reviews and several people thinks actually cuts better than the $150 knives.
- Blade cross profile - if you look end-on, a given class of knife will have a different profile, and I think this can make a quite a bit of difference. Many of the high-end, forged knives have an evenly tapered profile, from the back evenly thinning to the edge. With this style of profile, you don't have to do much grinding to get the really thin edge, since things were already very thin to begin with. On the opposite extreme, the cheapest stamped knives may be the same thickness all the way, with a hollow-ground (concave) taper at the last 1/4 inch to make the blade thin. I tend to dislike this style, probably not because it is inherently bad, but rather that it tends to be associated with cheap, bad, knives. In the middle, you can have forged knives that taper, but not thin enough at the end. They then "sharpen" them with what appears to be a blunter angle in the last 1/16th inch. My personal opinion - you will regret this every time you stone sharpen the knife, because you will have to grind down a lot of metal, and still probably won't get the 15 - 20 degree angle you want. Take home message - if you are getting a forged knife, look for one that has as little of a "final sharpening" edge as you can within your price point.
As for my personal decision (I bought a Calphalon Contemporary 8" chef's knife), and how I came to it - it went like this:
- Style mattered quite a bit for me - if I didn't buy a Henckel's knife which matched the others we had (and wonderful knives they are), I wanted to get something that was, well, "similar". This also (after great internal debate) tossed out the Victoninox, which I expect would meet the technical requirements well, but just wasn't my style.
- I wanted a chef's knife with a profile on the "french side of German". That tossed out Wusthof. Calphalon was very similar to the Henckels, perhaps a bit straighter.
- Material - I know from another knife I have by the same maker the Calphalon is a rather hard steel - it sharpens very much like the Henckels. This works for me, because I have good sharpening equipment and know how to use it. For others that just want a sharp knife - I'm told the Victorinox is softer, but takes a great edge.
- Cross profile - here I found quite a difference, and I expect this is one area where you get what you pay for in an expensive knife. The Henckels and the Wusthof have great, even tapers - you can't really tell where the edge begins. That's what you get for your $110. The $35 knives are much more variable. The one I picked was "most of the way there", which means that I expect I will need to work a bit more on sharpening, and possibly the knife may have a shorter maximum lifetime - after which the "base blade" will be too wide to taper well. However, this is still likely to be 20 years, and... I can buy three of these knives for the price of one Henckels, so... a trade that works for me.
