Types of Chef Knives

Series Summary

Every chef has an assortment of excellent cutlery. Most seasoned cooks have at least one very nice chef's knife. However, there are many exceptions to this rule. Some very good cooks do not even know how to use the kitchen knives they've got in their drawers. If you are such a cook, with great talent but poor knife skills, let our expert show you how to use a variety of cooking knives.

In this free video series, our expert will show you how to improve your knife skills using a variety of cutlery. You will learn how to use a serrated knife, vegetable knife, satoku knife and a paring knife. You will also get tips on how to dice and slice onions with a chef's knife, how to hold a chef's knife and how to cut a mango and pineapple. If you want to cook better and make your cuts more precise, let our expert teach you everything you need to know about cooking knives and how to use them.

Video Transcript

"LAURA BANFORD: Today, we're going to talk about knives, knife skills, the different kinds of knives and what you do with them. Here are some of the knives I'm going to be talking about. I have a serrated knife. This is for bread for the most part. I have a santoku knife. That is a Japanese style knife that has the divots all along the edge. And that is a very, very popular knife these days all around the world, not just in Japan. I have two chef's knives, an 8-inch chef's knife and a 6-inch chef's knife. Very useful for most tasks. This is a fillet knife. A fillet knife is long and pointed and a little bit flexible. This is a Japanese knife. It's Japanese steel. And it, I'm going to use it as a little cleaver. I don't have much use for a really big butcher's type cleaver, so I'm going to use this as my cleaver. It's cleaver-shaped, and it's just a terrific little knife. I have three paring knives. This is a regular chef's paring knife. This is a smaller one with a slightly serrated blade for different, smaller uses. And this is a nice, long, pointy knife; I'm going to use this to segment some citrus later. This is a specialty knife. It is a pineapple knife. You can see its, I don't know if you can see this, but it says Dole. I got it at the Dole plantation in Hawaii. And we're going to use that just for that purpose. These are two cheese knives. This is for a semi-soft to hard cheese, to slice it, and this would just be for a soft cheese like a Brie or maybe even a Roquefort. This is a mezzaluna, which means half moon or part, mezza, part of a moon. This is the moon shape here. And it has two handles and it rocks and it's usually used to chop herbs without bruising them. When we come back, we're going to talk about all of the parts of a knife."