Having a good sharp knife is essential for every chef. You use a knife for almost every dish you make, whether it’s chopping up some vegetables, carving meat or slicing bread. To do these tasks quickly and efficiently, you need to have a sharp knife and good knife technique. In this article, I will be talking about knives and my recommendation on which one you should buy.
First of all, there are many types of knives- there is the Chef’s knife, a serrated knife, a meat knife, and a Santoku knife. These 4 knives are the basic knives that I think every chef should have. The chef’s knife is useful for all sorts of things and will probably be your most-used knife, so if you can’t afford a good quality set of knives, just splurge on a very good chef’s knife. The serrated knife is useful in cutting bread and other hard substances because of the serration. Meat knives are thin and sharp designed to cut through meat easily. The Santoku knife has some ridges on the edge of the blade that helps food that sticks to the knife slide out easily while you’re cutting.
The brand of knives I would recommend is the Wusthof brand. You can buy these through our On the Pan store, from Amazon.
After buying a knife, taking care of it is also extremely important. Firstly, you should have a knife steel that is magnetized. Using this will help retain your knife’s sharpness, but keep in mind that it won’t be able to sharpen a blunt knife. Use this everyday before and/or after cutting anything. It will help your knives last a long time. To show you how to use this steel, a video will be put up here to teach you.
Sharpening knives can be done with the use of a whetstone. A whetstone acts sort of like sandpaper. It chips of small parts (you can’t see it) of your knife and by doing so, makes the end sharp again. Using a whetstone will also be shown through a video soon.
You could also give your knives to a professional knife sharpener to sharpen them to be as good and as sharp as new.