Thoughts on Kitchen Knives
Above is the Faraway Forge Paring Knife by Keaton Goddard
So one of the things I want to do more of in 2024 is cook. To incentivize that happening, I decided that I should look more into kitchen knives. So over the last few months I have done a lot of research on kitchen knives. They are baffling. Even with knife knowledge imported over from other kinds of knives I still feel very confused. Here are some of the things I was mystified about.
Cooking is one of our core acts that makes us human. And for many thousands of years, cooking was not just about improving the taste or edibility of food, but about making some things safe or safer to eat. Because of this combination of a long history and a safety feature, cooking like a few other aspects of human life, such as dealing with animals or heights, has powerful taboos or traditions. Few parts of human life are more “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” than cooking. As a result, the tools for cooking, are, for the most part pretty unchanged over the last thousand or so years. Of course there are new tools, of varying degrees of utility, but the core tools, like knives, tend to look very similar over time.
But something interesting happened in kitchen knives. We know that there are an array of traditional knife forms like the parong and the kukri, but in kitchen knives those endemic forms have largely been forced into two buckets—Western style knives and Japanese style knives. There are few endemic knife forms that exist outside these two camps, like the Ulu, but by in large every knife out there that is used in the kitchen comes from one of these two branches of design.
Japanese knives tend to dominate the collector’s end of the spectrum, with custom designs being very hot so long as they are in the Japanese form. There are, of course, people that still make custom Western style knives, but for a whole host of reasons, the custom market, which I plan on covering in addition to the production market, tends to be mostly Japanese. When I went to Blade Gallery in Seattle about 2/3rds of the store was kitchen knives and of those about 4/5ths were Japanese style knives. In part, I think this is because the production market, especially at the low to mid price ranges, tend to be Western style knives. Japanese knives FEEL exotic. Second, there are things that make Japanese knives easier to make for custom folks. The huge bolsters and handle materials sometimes seen on production knives are impossible or nearly impossible to replicate in a custom shop (especially the rubberized handles). Stick tangs, on the other hand, are easy as pie (comparatively speaking).
Some Japanese patterns are very old, like the Gyuto (the long chef knife looking blade) while others are very new, like the Santuko, which came about in post World War II Japan as Western forms and Japanese forms blended together. There are some Japanese patterns that have no Western equivalent—the Nakiri, for example, is a slicing knife so it is exceptionally thinly ground, but it has no point so it looks like a cleaver, which is decidedly not a slicing knife. So while I appreciate the thinly ground blades and the functional forms, I am not convinced that the best kitchen knife patterns are exclusively Japanese.
Then there is the old folk wisdom that you only need three knives—a chef knife, a paring knife, and bread knife (a long serrated blade). I think there is some truth in that. In addition to cutting down on clutter and being cheaper than a block full of blades, that small stable of knives makes it such that your skill grows to meet new challenges. That’s a good thing. Sure, a cleaver and a Nakiri are nice, but if you have the skills at cutting, which I decidedly do not have yet, then the Core Three can get you to the finish line almost every time.
There is one other bit of kitchen cutlery folk wisdom that I have to address—steel. Kitchen knives, for the most part, are about 15-20 years behind the rest of the cutlery market in terms of steel. For example, there is still a strong current of boosterism for carbon steels. And carbon steels can be good, but there is simply no reason to use them in high end kitchen cutlery. Part of this comes from a refusal to adopt new things. The other part of this, especially when money is not really an issue, is that Bob Kramer uses 52100 in his customs. Bob Kramer is THE legend when it comes to kitchen knives. The first $10,000, $25,000, and $50,000+ custom kitchen knives were made by Kramer. Here is one of his collabs with Tom Ferry that is jaw dropping. He has a deal with Zwilling and they make a series of production knives based on his designs, so what he likes tends to set the trends for the top end of the market. Suffice to say Bob Kramer is the King of Kitchen Knives for a reason.
That said in the rest of the cutlery world, we have moved on to stainless steels that can get just as hard as the high carbon steels used in high end kitchen cutlery. M390, 20CV, and Magnacut absolutely crush 52100, Blue Steel and White Steel that lots of collectors cherish. They are just as hard and are virtually stainproof. If the kitchen knife folks said their devotion to carbon steels was due to their high hardness and then used some HSS Maxamet or Rex 121 I would understand, but those steels could never fuction well in a kitchen environment.
There are, of course, smart collectors that buck every one of these trends and there are custom makers that both have their own styles that merge the best of the East and West and use modern steels to boot, but if there were a lot of entrenched ideas in the folder or fixed blade market 15 years ago when this blog started, there are even more in the kitchen knife space. Us non-kitchen knife folks look like open-minded pragmatists compared to the majority of the kitchen knife people.
The first knife in for review is the legendary and controversial Victorinox Fibrox Pro 8-inch Chef’s Knife. If there is going to be a fight, may as well jump in right away.
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