Advice on Kitchen Knives Please

I've always wanted to buy a set of Shun knives- but when I bought my first home I was gifted a small set of wusthof blades.
I considered them my "best" at first, but within three years I had acquired two more sets of random knives, and now I have an eight and ten inch Henckel.

All told, I'd rate all three about equal.
The wusthof is the only one I've used with a hammer to cut things not meant for kitchen knives, and it took it well.

The Henckels seem to hold an edge longer when I get around to my yearly knife sharpening party- but that might just be because I sharpen all of my knives at the same angle, instead of respecting the factory angles. Different steel will perform differently with a different edge.

I'm told there's a guy around here that will drive his knife truck to you, and sharpen your blades right in your driveway... for cash. I should find his number.
In the end, IMO, it doesn't matter what knife you get. If you don't maintain the edge, its still just a strip of thin steel with a mild edge. the block, color, handle, and finish are all just preference and mean nothing when it comes to performance.

Ergonomics probably matter if you're not an ape like myself, but as far as I can tell it only comes down to keeping the cutting edge sharp.

originally posted by: neomaximus10
Cutco knives....look them up, phenomenal, i have a set of steak knives, 20 years old, still as sharp as the day i bought them.
a reply to: IAMTAT

Got a set of Cutco steak knives....Always sharp.

Al Mar knives. They make em for chef’s too.

knifeworks.com...

originally posted by: IAMTAT

originally posted by: AutomateThis1
How much are you willing to spend?

Whatever it takes to keep her happy.

Then, I recommend Takeshi Saji.

His knives are strong and beautiful and hold their value. You may even find yourself passing them down the family line if you take good care of them.

a reply to: IAMTAT
You want something that is well balanced and also feels good in the hand I had been a big wusthof fan until my buddy turned me on to zwilling Kramer euroline Damascus. The feel amazing in the hand and very well balanced.

a reply to: IAMTAT

I cook a lot, only two knives are needed. A Victorinox steak knife and a quality Chinese Cleaver.
Seriously, these two can handle anything.
I had all those fancy blocks and knife sets and ended up not using a lot of it.

The Victorinox steak knife is one of the finest knives for the kitchen. Downside, it feels cheap because of the handle. The upside is the blade is shaaaaarp. Very easy to peel, slice through bread, fruit, veggies etc.
The Chinese cleaver can handle all the big jobs. When I cut through bone it still amazes me. Even though it’s a big honking knife but you can cut see through thin slices.

On a side note, it’s not Feng Shui to display knives on a counter, much better mo jo jo hiding in a drawer (always protect the blade though)
Also very bad Feng Shui to gift anything that cuts/ knives / scissors etc. It’s as if you are cutting the relationship.
I know some people don’t believe it but you never know.

We have some Victorinox paring knives we really like for doing veggies. They are four inch knives I think. We actually just bought a couple more for stock. a few runs over the round dagger like sharpening file and they sharpen right up like new. We would not have a problem with the blades if the wife would stop using that glass cutting board or cut stuff on glass plates. The tips do snap off if you use them to pry covers off that are stuck. Not good for opening paint cans.

I think this is the one we get. www.victorinox.com... EgJ-LvD_BwE&gclaw.ds

We do not have a set, we buy the knives we like to work with and many different kits have knives in them that we do not like so we pick and choose what we like. We used to have piles of knives in the drawers we never used because we did not care for them so we picked the best that we liked and use them. Some are very old, they do not make them anymore. I do like the chicago cutlery sharpening stone that looks like a ten inch poker. Most of the chicago cutlery we had we gave away, we still have some knives the wife and I like out of the two sets of chicago cutlery we had, we gave the blocks and most of the knives away because we have much better ones that we like. We had a couple of nice knives that got lost maybe twenty years ago and we cannot find them anymore, they were five inches with a round tip on the blade, thin stainless and very hard and brittle but we lost them or let them somewhere. They were old twenty years ago...and the brand couldn't be found, maybe if we remembered the name, with the internet now we could find them.

Do you know where Damascus steel comes in on the Rockwell C scale?

a reply to: IAMTAT

It is whatever hardness the steel you use is.
It is just heating and folding to make a pattern for looks, but it has actual functionality, as it keeps food from sticking. It makes it slice like crazy.
The blades I'm after are made with a technique called "Japanese folded steel." Not to be confused with damascus.
Best of both worlds. The blades spine, or the majority of it's build is a softer metal that is rapped around a smaller, much harder core that extends out into the cutting edge.
It is how samurai swords were/are made.
It gives it excellent flex that won't break while keeping the higher cutting edge hardness.
Blades with a single hardness don't come close to this performance imo.
There's still some good ones out there, but the folded steel design is tops imo.
The shun is a pretty good setup without going nuts. They do folded steel and double bevel. So it's not sharpened on one side like some Japanese blades.

a reply to: IAMTAT

I will also put in another vote for Wusthof.

I would caution against buying a "set" of knives, and instead creating your own set. Many 'sets' are not the highest quality of a given brand. Plus, you'll usually wind up with a couple to several knives you'll never use because you don't like them. So, to give you an example of our set up...

Our Wusthof's are the chef's knives (we also have a couple of Kyocera's in the chef knife category as well). Our boning and utility knives are all Forschner (now Victorinox) commercial knives. Paring knives are Wusthof, and F. Dick. Our nakiri (vegetable) knife is a Sakai Takayuki. And our santokus are JA Henckels.

Many moons ago we had knife 'sets', but we got rid of those long ago.

Hopefully this is helpful.

ETA - Scanning through the thread I see a few references to steel types, etc. As a self-described knife nut (maker, sharpener and connoisseur), I'm happy to provide you any guidance you'd like on knife steel types, edge characteristics, blade characteristics and shapes. I don't forge my own steel, but that's about the only thing I don't currently do with respect to knives. So, feel free to ask.

a reply to: Flyingclaydisk

Thank you. Very helpful...and she has decided to not buy an entire set...Wusthof seems to be where she is leaning.

a reply to: IAMTAT

The important thing to remember is not to get too hung up on a single brand. It's a huge mistake. Too many people worry about having their knives all look the same, and this comes at the expense of function. Different manufacturers excel at different kinds of knives. There is no one single manufacturer who can do it all, IMHO of course.

Oh, and then the golden rule, if you're going to invest in a nice set of knives... Never, ever, and I mean NEVER (ever, ever, ever, ever) put your knives in the dishwasher!!! This is the Number ONE way to completely destroy a high quality knife (and it's more than just the edge)!! Steak knives and butter knives are fine, but not your kitchen knives.

One other thing.

If you're going to invest in a nice set of knives, I would strongly recommend getting a high quality knife steel and learning how to use it. Learning how to steel a knife is critical to maintaining your edges in between sharpening, and it will also cut down on the number of times you have to put the knife to a stone (and I use all Japanese water stones on ours BTW).

a reply to: IAMTAT

Do you know where Damascus steel comes in on the Rockwell C scale?

Oh boy, now there's a topic of debate!

Damascus steel hardness can be all over the place, even in the same blade sometimes. Generally speaking around 59-60, but only if you know exactly how the blade was made. There are some damascus steels down in the low to mid 50's, and others as high as 62-64. Damascus is popular mostly because it looks so cool. I'd probably stay away from damascus steel for your kitchen knives unless you know exactly what you're looking at. If you were buying handmade custom knives that might be one thing, but commercially produced damascus...I'd walk the other way.

My wife bought me a damascus knife once for Christmas. When I went to sharpen it I thought I was sharpening a diamond! That steel was so hard I couldn't even believe it was steel! I thought I was going to have to take that thing to the bench grinder to get it to sharpen!! LOL! Put a huge belly in one of my stones and didn't even phase the edge of the knife, it was unbelievable. Thankfully it wasn't one of my really expensive stones, but still I had to take a bunch of material off with a leveling stone just to get it trued back up. Definitely harder than any stainless I've ever come across. I did manage to get it sharp, but it took some doing. Definitely not my favorite knife at all! I haven't tested it to see, but it must be brittle as hell.

'47boomer made some great points in his post. He touched on it, but just to elaborate a little further; sharpening angle is really important and task specific. A good general purpose angle is 22.5 degree bevel, but I've got some as low as 11 degrees (and lemme tell ya, that knife is WICKED sharp! Scary!), and some others as high as 30 degrees on a cleaver. You'll hear a lot about how sharp many Japanese knives are. One of the reasons for this is many of the higher end Japanese knives are single bevel knives (as opposed to the more standard double beveled edges). However, the term "bevel" has been kind of bastardized in the west. To most here in the west a 'double bevel' is an edge with two different angle grinds on the edge. But in Japan the term refers to what we would call a chisel grind in the west where only one side of the edge is beveled. It's not exactly a chisel grind though because the blade is actually concave on the flat side. Anyway, these knives are spectacularly sharp. The trade-off though, as with any knife, is a thin edge like this is very fragile and requires frequent sharpening.

With knives a good general rule is, the shallower the angle of the grind the quicker the edge will dull but the sharper it will be, and the larger the angle of the grind the more durable the edge will be at the expense of total sharpness. And this is where the type and hardness of the steel is important. Certain steel types perform better with one edge type over another edge type. Perfectly match the steel type, to the edge type, to the task at hand and you've created the perfect knife. People have been at it for thousands of years and there's still no single right answer.

Maybe a little more than you cared to know about knives and edges, but at least now you'll know what some of the terms mean when you see them referenced in knife specifications.

originally posted by: Flyingclaydisk
a reply to: IAMTAT


Oh, and then the golden rule, if you're going to invest in a nice set of knives... Never, ever, and I mean NEVER (ever, ever, ever, ever) put your knives in the dishwasher!!! This is the Number ONE way to completely destroy a high quality knife (and it's more than just the edge)!! Steak knives and butter knives are fine, but not your kitchen knives.

Oooooooof. That just reminded me of the time I was a culinary student, and my teacher had bought me a pretty nice knife for a private catering event. After, the event we had gone back to the class kitchen, and my dumbass had wrapped the knife up in a towel and tossed it in with the dirty towels.

Totally ruined.

FTR...I am in awe of the knowledge members possess on this subject.
Thank you all, for taking the time and effort share your impressive expertise.

originally posted by: IAMTAT
FTR...I am in awe of the knowledge members possess on this subject.
Thank you all, for taking the time and effort share your impressive expertise.

Once she gets her new knives I'm going to remind her that the way to a man's heart is through his ribcage.

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus

originally posted by: IAMTAT
FTR...I am in awe of the knowledge members possess on this subject.
Thank you all, for taking the time and effort share your impressive expertise.

Once she gets her new knives I'm going to remind her that the way to a man's heart is through his ribcage.

She already knows 3754 ways to kill me...I read her diary when she's out doing evening Hot Yoga classes with Carlos, our lawn guy.

a reply to: IAMTAT

My name is Luis, goddammit.

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus
a reply to: IAMTAT

My name is Luis, goddammit.

Sorry.


...also you forgot to edge the driveway this week.

originally posted by: IAMTAT
Sorry.


...also you forgot to edge the driveway this week.

Lo siento, puto, I was busy fertilizing. Again.