One Sec...
Tool Talk: Knives
I adore knives. I don't mean I collect weird fantasy knives and swords or something - I outgrew that before I could afford the things, fortunately. But I have become addicted to knives in the kitchen, and I am mesmerized by good information about them.
Looking for knife maintenance and sharpening tips? Jump to Part 3.
In Japan, of course, the knife-making tradition is long and distinguished. I have spent some time in Aritsugu, a famous old knife shop now in Nishiki market, and had a little master-class on sharpening technique. I've also been doing a lot of research about high-end knives, Japanese and otherwise, because while I'm here I'm going to buy a few Aritsugu products and want to get things I'll love. So let's talk knives.
Here are my current knives here in Japan. Left to right: cheap paring knife, beautiful Aritsugu paring knife, mediocre santoku I picked up cheap (actually free), excellent handmade yanagiba sashimi knife that I got as a wedding present, truly bad santoku that came with the house. At home in the US, the knives I actually kept in the block for relatively constant use were: Chinese cleaver, 7-inch chef's knife, paring knife, boning knife, bread knife, yanagiba, sharpening steel. That list will change considerably when I get home.
Knives are the most important and useful kitchen tools, but a lot of people will blow huge sums on pots and appliances, then get miserly when it comes to knives. That's backwards: you can use a cheap, thin pot if you're careful, but there is no substitute for a good knife. Fortunately, by comparison to a biggish Le Creuset or All-Clad pot, excellent knives are cheap. They will also last a very long time if you take care of them.
So what do you need to know? Three basic things:
Which Knives Should I Own?
I am not a fan of Food Network's Alton Brown, but he has a principle that is dead-on: never buy equipment that has only one use. Don't buy a garlic press or an olive-pit extractor. I would modify this as follows:
Don't buy equipment with only one use, unless you do that thing constantly
If you want to experiment with making yogurt, don't buy a yogurt maker. If you make yogurt every few days, without fail, buy a yogurt maker. This is why I think you should buy a rice cooker if you cook Japanese food (and Chinese food, etc.): you'll be making rice at least a couple of times per week, so a single-use appliance makes sense. Besides, you can make other things in a rice cooker, as I'll discuss in a later column.
As for knives, a great many are special-purpose. A ham slicer, for example, is really only good for slicing hams and things like them into very thin sheets, though it's also excellent for splitting cakes into layers. A butcher's cleaver is for splitting marrow-bones, cutting through very heavy joints (e.g. removing the rack from a whole lamb saddle), and so on. If you don't do these things constantly, you don't need these knives.
The best way to think about it, in my opinion, is in terms of usage. There's cutting vegetables, cutting meat, cutting fish, and precision work. Everything else is only going to come up once in a blue moon for most home cooks. So what you want is a small set of knives that do these things very well. If you have only a few knives, you will use them often and get used to them. If you decide to replace something, you will know exactly what you want, whether it's the same knife or another that has better characteristics for your way of doing things.
As to what you want, there is unfortunately no one right answer, in part because there is more than one system of knives. I'll describe the three systems I know, and make recommendations. Since this is a Japan-based column, I'll start here.
The Japanese Knife System
For vegetables, there is the usuba, at the top here, which is straight-edged or very close, thin, and light. This is the thing they use to make huge sheets of translucent daikon by working around and around, which is one of those skills nobody needs except a professional Japanese chef, but every one of those can do it. You can learn it if you want - just watch this guy and practice - but why?
For heavy cutting, there is the deba bocho, or deba, which is heavy and thick-bladed. You have to be careful cutting some vegetables with the usuba, because the blade is thin and will be damaged by cutting raw pumpkin or something, so you use the deba instead. You also use this to cut meat and poultry. And, most of all, you use it to fillet fish off the bone (note that this is completely different from the French approach, and requires a very different technique). So this is really the workhorse of the Japanese kitchen. You can get these in a range of sizes, from about 3" to about 14", but roughly 7" is fairly normal; the little guys are for professionally preparing small fish like aji (horse mackerel: one serving is one fish), and the big guys are for dealing with big deep-sea fish whole. A deba is very expensive because it requires a special forging technique to make the blade super-durable but also scary sharp.
Once the fish is off the bone, you can cut it in pieces with your yanagiba (willow blade), at the bottom, one of the more popular styles of sashimi knife, the other main one being the tako-hiki (octopus draw). These knives are long and thin, and honed to razor sharpness (that's meant literally: you can shave with them). This makes the blades very delicate, and they must be handled with care; for one thing, they should never, ever touch bone, which is why you first fillet the fish with a deba and only then cut it in sashimi with a yanagiba.
You may have heard of the santoku. This is the Japanese knife-maker's answer to the French-style chef's knife, which they encountered in the late 19th century or so and thought useful. A santoku is generally a bit smaller and slightly differently shaped than a chef's knife, being sort of halfway between a chef's knife and a usuba. Some people seem very worked up about these knives being the best thing, I think primarily because they think this is a traditional Japanese super-wonderful knife. It's not. Among professionals, the design has become especially popular in the West with chefs who have smallish hands, particularly women. In Japan, it is a ubiquitous household knife, being easier to use than knives from the traditional system. The one in this photo is hollow-ground, which is supposed to make it slice easier, but there is some disagreement about whether that's really true.
My strong impression is that the ordinary Japanese home, assuming it has a woman (almost certainly) who likes to cook a bit, has a santoku, a yanagiba or similar, and a paring knife or similar. Ceramic knives are very popular, I think because the average housewife does not want to sharpen her knives.
The French Knife System
For all regular cutting, there is the chef's knife, which is long and triangular, with a slightly curved blade. The handle is set such that if you hold the knife normally and cut straight down to the board, your knuckles will not strike the board because the blade gets there first, which is why it is so good for chopping.
For precision work, there is the paring knife, at the bottom, which is short and thin.
For some more specialized precision work, such as filleting some kinds of fish, there is the boning knife, which is long, thin, and flexible. Note again that French-style filleting is done very differently, technique-wise, from Japanese, and the knives are completely differently structured.
The Chinese Knife System
For almost everything, there is the Chinese cleaver, which is a large rectangle with a very slightly curved blade.
For precision work, there are a number of different kinds of smaller knives, but the ordinary Chinese home cook rarely has any of them. A paring knife is popular. If you want to fillet fish and the like, you may find a French boning knife very useful, but it's not necessary.
Advantages and Disadvantages
Japanese: Japanese traditional knives are hard to find in the West, and often extremely expensive. Much of the time you're paying a middleman: I have seen a number of perfectly respectable Japanese knives that here cost about $125 being sold on American websites for more than $200.
Most top-quality Japanese knives are made of high-carbon steel, which means you have to be careful to avoid rust; on the other hand, they will generally be a bit easier to sharpen than their stainless counterparts (see below about this).
Anything you are likely to read about how to use knives properly will not apply directly to Japanese traditional knives, primarily because they are single-edged. That is, in profile they look like chisels: one side (the back) is totally flat, and only the other side (the front) slants down to make an edge. So if you like Jacques PĂ©pin, Julia Child, and people like that, you will not be able to use their advice on cutting with Japanese knives.
(single-edged left, double-edged right)
French: French knives are readily available at a wide range of prices and quality. You can get ripped off, because lots of foodie idiots get all excited about buying the most expensive knives, but you can rely on a number of excellent, consistent brands - which will not be cheap.
Anything you are likely to read about how to use knives properly is aimed at these knives. Be careful, though: there is a nasty habit of recommending a very wide variety of different knives when you actually can do almost everything with these three. Resist the temptation.
Chinese: You only need two knives, a cleaver and a paring knife. The best mass-production Chinese cleaver I know of costs under $60 and appears to be totally indestructible. For almost everything, you use only this one knife, which means you will soon get very familiar with it. If you use one, you will find that it is lovely to be able to chop stuff and then scrape it up on the side of the blade to move it wherever you want it.
Many people are afraid of big knives, and these things are scary. The only sane ways I know of to learn how to use them well are (1) read Barbara Tropp's The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking, and (2) watch Martin Yan very, very closely. Preferably both. Martin Yan may be a bit of a clown, but watch his hands: he is, to quote Ming Tsai, "the fastest knife in the West," and he's not fooling around when it comes to cutting. Watch closely - he's so fast you miss things.
My Advice
If you already are happy with your personal system of knives, you don't need my advice, though I'd recommend that you trim down: try to do as much as possible with the main few knives and stop messing around with the others.
Assuming you don't already have much of a preference:
1. Don't go the Japanese route. It's too difficult to learn, expensive to buy, and tricky to take care of. If you try it, plan to pay about $150 per knife, give or take. You may have to get some lessons on how to use them right.
2. If you think it's fun to play with big knives and flashy technique, go Chinese, but get a boning knife if you ever intend to fillet a fish, unless you want to take lessons on how to fillet with a cleaver. The cleaver should cost under $60.
3. If you are at all familiar with French knives, or are afraid of really big knives, or just have no opinion, go French and make your life easier. If you have small hands, consider a santoku instead of a chef's knife as such. Expect to pay $100 for the chef's knife or santoku.
Wrap-Up
Okay, so let's suppose you already have good-quality knives fitting the system you want. You've got, for example, a santoku, a paring knife, and a boning knife. But you have lots of other knives. So put all those knives in a box and put that box somewhere out of the way. If you actually need something in it, meaning you cannot reasonably use one of your main three for the once-in-a-blue-moon purpose, take it out and put it in the block to stay. After a couple years, sell everything else in the box at a yard sale: it's all useless to you.
Let me sum up quickly:
Japanese
Expensive, tricky, and very different in usage from other systems. Not popular in Japan with almost anyone outside the restaurant trade.
French
Standard in the West, often promoted by people who want you to buy a zillion knives.
Chinese
Simple, cheap, and possibly scary:
Looking for knife maintenance and sharpening tips? Jump to Part 3.
In Japan, of course, the knife-making tradition is long and distinguished. I have spent some time in Aritsugu, a famous old knife shop now in Nishiki market, and had a little master-class on sharpening technique. I've also been doing a lot of research about high-end knives, Japanese and otherwise, because while I'm here I'm going to buy a few Aritsugu products and want to get things I'll love. So let's talk knives.
Here are my current knives here in Japan. Left to right: cheap paring knife, beautiful Aritsugu paring knife, mediocre santoku I picked up cheap (actually free), excellent handmade yanagiba sashimi knife that I got as a wedding present, truly bad santoku that came with the house. At home in the US, the knives I actually kept in the block for relatively constant use were: Chinese cleaver, 7-inch chef's knife, paring knife, boning knife, bread knife, yanagiba, sharpening steel. That list will change considerably when I get home.
Knives are the most important and useful kitchen tools, but a lot of people will blow huge sums on pots and appliances, then get miserly when it comes to knives. That's backwards: you can use a cheap, thin pot if you're careful, but there is no substitute for a good knife. Fortunately, by comparison to a biggish Le Creuset or All-Clad pot, excellent knives are cheap. They will also last a very long time if you take care of them.
So what do you need to know? Three basic things:
- Which knives should I own?
- Which brands, blade metals, edges, and so on are best?
- How do I take care of them when I have them?
Which Knives Should I Own?
I am not a fan of Food Network's Alton Brown, but he has a principle that is dead-on: never buy equipment that has only one use. Don't buy a garlic press or an olive-pit extractor. I would modify this as follows:
Don't buy equipment with only one use, unless you do that thing constantly
If you want to experiment with making yogurt, don't buy a yogurt maker. If you make yogurt every few days, without fail, buy a yogurt maker. This is why I think you should buy a rice cooker if you cook Japanese food (and Chinese food, etc.): you'll be making rice at least a couple of times per week, so a single-use appliance makes sense. Besides, you can make other things in a rice cooker, as I'll discuss in a later column.
As for knives, a great many are special-purpose. A ham slicer, for example, is really only good for slicing hams and things like them into very thin sheets, though it's also excellent for splitting cakes into layers. A butcher's cleaver is for splitting marrow-bones, cutting through very heavy joints (e.g. removing the rack from a whole lamb saddle), and so on. If you don't do these things constantly, you don't need these knives.
The best way to think about it, in my opinion, is in terms of usage. There's cutting vegetables, cutting meat, cutting fish, and precision work. Everything else is only going to come up once in a blue moon for most home cooks. So what you want is a small set of knives that do these things very well. If you have only a few knives, you will use them often and get used to them. If you decide to replace something, you will know exactly what you want, whether it's the same knife or another that has better characteristics for your way of doing things.
As to what you want, there is unfortunately no one right answer, in part because there is more than one system of knives. I'll describe the three systems I know, and make recommendations. Since this is a Japan-based column, I'll start here.
The Japanese Knife System
For vegetables, there is the usuba, at the top here, which is straight-edged or very close, thin, and light. This is the thing they use to make huge sheets of translucent daikon by working around and around, which is one of those skills nobody needs except a professional Japanese chef, but every one of those can do it. You can learn it if you want - just watch this guy and practice - but why?
For heavy cutting, there is the deba bocho, or deba, which is heavy and thick-bladed. You have to be careful cutting some vegetables with the usuba, because the blade is thin and will be damaged by cutting raw pumpkin or something, so you use the deba instead. You also use this to cut meat and poultry. And, most of all, you use it to fillet fish off the bone (note that this is completely different from the French approach, and requires a very different technique). So this is really the workhorse of the Japanese kitchen. You can get these in a range of sizes, from about 3" to about 14", but roughly 7" is fairly normal; the little guys are for professionally preparing small fish like aji (horse mackerel: one serving is one fish), and the big guys are for dealing with big deep-sea fish whole. A deba is very expensive because it requires a special forging technique to make the blade super-durable but also scary sharp.
Once the fish is off the bone, you can cut it in pieces with your yanagiba (willow blade), at the bottom, one of the more popular styles of sashimi knife, the other main one being the tako-hiki (octopus draw). These knives are long and thin, and honed to razor sharpness (that's meant literally: you can shave with them). This makes the blades very delicate, and they must be handled with care; for one thing, they should never, ever touch bone, which is why you first fillet the fish with a deba and only then cut it in sashimi with a yanagiba.
You may have heard of the santoku. This is the Japanese knife-maker's answer to the French-style chef's knife, which they encountered in the late 19th century or so and thought useful. A santoku is generally a bit smaller and slightly differently shaped than a chef's knife, being sort of halfway between a chef's knife and a usuba. Some people seem very worked up about these knives being the best thing, I think primarily because they think this is a traditional Japanese super-wonderful knife. It's not. Among professionals, the design has become especially popular in the West with chefs who have smallish hands, particularly women. In Japan, it is a ubiquitous household knife, being easier to use than knives from the traditional system. The one in this photo is hollow-ground, which is supposed to make it slice easier, but there is some disagreement about whether that's really true.
My strong impression is that the ordinary Japanese home, assuming it has a woman (almost certainly) who likes to cook a bit, has a santoku, a yanagiba or similar, and a paring knife or similar. Ceramic knives are very popular, I think because the average housewife does not want to sharpen her knives.
The French Knife System
For all regular cutting, there is the chef's knife, which is long and triangular, with a slightly curved blade. The handle is set such that if you hold the knife normally and cut straight down to the board, your knuckles will not strike the board because the blade gets there first, which is why it is so good for chopping.
For precision work, there is the paring knife, at the bottom, which is short and thin.
For some more specialized precision work, such as filleting some kinds of fish, there is the boning knife, which is long, thin, and flexible. Note again that French-style filleting is done very differently, technique-wise, from Japanese, and the knives are completely differently structured.
The Chinese Knife System
For almost everything, there is the Chinese cleaver, which is a large rectangle with a very slightly curved blade.
For precision work, there are a number of different kinds of smaller knives, but the ordinary Chinese home cook rarely has any of them. A paring knife is popular. If you want to fillet fish and the like, you may find a French boning knife very useful, but it's not necessary.
Advantages and Disadvantages
Japanese: Japanese traditional knives are hard to find in the West, and often extremely expensive. Much of the time you're paying a middleman: I have seen a number of perfectly respectable Japanese knives that here cost about $125 being sold on American websites for more than $200.
Most top-quality Japanese knives are made of high-carbon steel, which means you have to be careful to avoid rust; on the other hand, they will generally be a bit easier to sharpen than their stainless counterparts (see below about this).
Anything you are likely to read about how to use knives properly will not apply directly to Japanese traditional knives, primarily because they are single-edged. That is, in profile they look like chisels: one side (the back) is totally flat, and only the other side (the front) slants down to make an edge. So if you like Jacques PĂ©pin, Julia Child, and people like that, you will not be able to use their advice on cutting with Japanese knives.
(single-edged left, double-edged right)French: French knives are readily available at a wide range of prices and quality. You can get ripped off, because lots of foodie idiots get all excited about buying the most expensive knives, but you can rely on a number of excellent, consistent brands - which will not be cheap.
Anything you are likely to read about how to use knives properly is aimed at these knives. Be careful, though: there is a nasty habit of recommending a very wide variety of different knives when you actually can do almost everything with these three. Resist the temptation.
Chinese: You only need two knives, a cleaver and a paring knife. The best mass-production Chinese cleaver I know of costs under $60 and appears to be totally indestructible. For almost everything, you use only this one knife, which means you will soon get very familiar with it. If you use one, you will find that it is lovely to be able to chop stuff and then scrape it up on the side of the blade to move it wherever you want it.
Many people are afraid of big knives, and these things are scary. The only sane ways I know of to learn how to use them well are (1) read Barbara Tropp's The Modern Art of Chinese Cooking, and (2) watch Martin Yan very, very closely. Preferably both. Martin Yan may be a bit of a clown, but watch his hands: he is, to quote Ming Tsai, "the fastest knife in the West," and he's not fooling around when it comes to cutting. Watch closely - he's so fast you miss things.
My Advice
If you already are happy with your personal system of knives, you don't need my advice, though I'd recommend that you trim down: try to do as much as possible with the main few knives and stop messing around with the others.
Assuming you don't already have much of a preference:
1. Don't go the Japanese route. It's too difficult to learn, expensive to buy, and tricky to take care of. If you try it, plan to pay about $150 per knife, give or take. You may have to get some lessons on how to use them right.
2. If you think it's fun to play with big knives and flashy technique, go Chinese, but get a boning knife if you ever intend to fillet a fish, unless you want to take lessons on how to fillet with a cleaver. The cleaver should cost under $60.
3. If you are at all familiar with French knives, or are afraid of really big knives, or just have no opinion, go French and make your life easier. If you have small hands, consider a santoku instead of a chef's knife as such. Expect to pay $100 for the chef's knife or santoku.
Wrap-Up
Okay, so let's suppose you already have good-quality knives fitting the system you want. You've got, for example, a santoku, a paring knife, and a boning knife. But you have lots of other knives. So put all those knives in a box and put that box somewhere out of the way. If you actually need something in it, meaning you cannot reasonably use one of your main three for the once-in-a-blue-moon purpose, take it out and put it in the block to stay. After a couple years, sell everything else in the box at a yard sale: it's all useless to you.
Let me sum up quickly:
Japanese
Expensive, tricky, and very different in usage from other systems. Not popular in Japan with almost anyone outside the restaurant trade.
- Usuba: vegetable knife
- Deba: heavy-use knife
- Yanagiba: sashimi knife
French
Standard in the West, often promoted by people who want you to buy a zillion knives.
- Chef's knife: workhorse; can be replaced by a santoku
- Paring knife: precision work
- Boning knife: mainly for filleting fish, but some other delicate work
Chinese
Simple, cheap, and possibly scary:
- Chinese cleaver: workhorse
- Paring knife: precision work
- Boning knife: unless you want to learn how to fillet fish with a cleaver
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Comments (3) · Want to Comment? Log In!
mct · Hugely useful! Thanks Chris!
Milligan · Good article. If you do a lot of Chinese cooking, though, you might want to consider a lightweight vegetable cleaver as well, cause the heavier meat cleaver can get pretty tiring if you're doing a lot of chopping. They are really cheap, I think I paid $7 for mine (high-carbon, unknown brand) in a Chinese grocery store about 20 years ago.
rockbirthedme · *THANK YOU* for being sensible about this. My experience over twenty years of simply cooking meal after meal for the family is that I reach automatically for the French chef's knife, and never put it down unless I need to cut raw meat, at which point I reach for the boning knife. I have a slew of other knives, including a handful of paring knives, but as far as I'm concerned, their purpose is to distract the family from using and abusing *my* knives.
