How to find the best kitchen knife
It’s the single most handled item in the kitchen, maybe the entire house. Held even more than the TV remote, the kitchen knife is the center point around which the whole house revolves.
Especially during the holidays, as home cooks log overtime in the scullery, this indispensable tool is never far from hand. Any way you slice it, almost every dish involves cutting something, a tomato, lemon, nuts, an onion and ideally, not your finger. (I’ll help you avoid that in a minute.)
Because the chef’s knife is so essential, many reviewers have diced the finer points of a variety of chef’s knives available on today’s market to find which one stands a cut above.
Now, I know you are on the edge of your cutting board, waiting for me to name your knife as the best one. (I was kind of hoping for that myself.) However, turns out, no one knife is tops in every cook’s book. For various reasons, reviewers selected favorites from a variety of manufacturers.
Although reviewers don’t all agree on the top knife, they do agree on this: the best knife is the sharpest one. A great knife with a dull edge will never be better than an inferior one that is razor-sharp. And no knife stays sharp forever, says Lisa McManus, executive editor and reviewer for America’s
Test Kitchen.
Gregg Kurtz has been a professional knife sharpener for 45 years. I sidled up next to him last weekend at the farmers market in Winter Park, Florida, where he has a booth each week and sharpens knives and garden tools for a steady stream of customers.
“Too many people treat their kitchen knives as utensils,” he says. “They throw them in the dishwasher then the drawer. The knife is not a utensil. It’s a tool.”
After speaking with him and McManus, I gleaned these pointers to help you cut through the hype to