Video: Types of Chef Knives

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Overview of knives, such as santoku, serrated, vegetable and paring knives and what they're used for; tips, tricks and more in this free online cooking video that will teach you about chef knives with tips from an expert.

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Comments

ltbluechip Sep 22, 2008
DennyCrane is absolutely correct. Any student that handled a knife like this woman would be fired on the spot and sent back to school. To teach is man's greatest achievement, to mould the mind and forge a future. This "expert" is not a teacher, she is a saboteur.
ltbluechip Sep 22, 2008
DennyCrane is absolutely correct. Any student that handled a knife like this woman would be fired on the spot and sent back to school. To teach is man's greatest achievement, to mould the mind and forge a future. This "expert" is not a teacher, she is a saboteur.
ltbluechip Sep 22, 2008
DennyCrane is absolutely correct. Any student that handled a knife like this woman would be fired on the spot and sent back to school. To teach is man's greatest achievement, to mould the mind and forge a future. This "expert" is not a teacher, she is a saboteur.
ltbluechip Sep 22, 2008
DennyCrane is absolutely correct. Any student that handled a knife like this woman would be fired on the spot and sent back to school. To teach is man's greatest achievement, to mould the mind and forge a future. This "expert" is not a teacher, she is a saboteur.
dennycrane Aug 02, 2008
If you're starting here, stop now and move on. There are plenty of competent people who demonstrate knife skills on YouTube. This series of videos is just wrong. She teaches how to ruin knives by improperly applying them to stones and steels, by hacking at hard objects with the wrong tools, and demonstrates poor technique on vegetables with dull knives.

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.