Choosing a Chef's Knife

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village; today I would like to speak with you about what to look for when buying kitchen knives. We're looking at chef knives; this is the most important knife decision you're going to make; as far as your knives go. Because you're going to have to get one of these; uh, here's a traditional European style, this is a 9-inch, it's kind of a weird size, but, this one's served me very, very well for the last ten years or so. Uh, 9-inch chef's knives are going to have your traditional, uh, very gradual curve here, it's going to have an almost straight back, you get here it's going to taper off. And very solid bolster, very nice, long blade designed for cutting. Uh, this is kind of um, this is what most of the time you're going to see. Also showed you a couple of alternatives, that I wanted, I also brought a couple of alternatives I wanted to show you. So. Here we have, this is uh what they call a Santoku knife, or Santuko depending on who you talk to, or how it's spelled on the package. Um, this knife you'll notice, in comparison to this one, the blade is completely different. Where as this one is curved on the bottom, and fairly straight on the top, this one is curved on the top, and fairly straight on the bottom. Um, this is kind of becoming the new standard for most chef knives, uh, it's obviously not the European standard. Uh, the advantage to these, is that you get less rocking motion, and you get more of a, a blade-to-cutting board contact along this edge; as opposed to this knife, you see it's contact edge stops here, and you have to rock it. As opposed to this knife, where it's contact, contact edge doesn't stop until up here. You don't really have to rock it nearly as much; you see this is a little bit. Um, you'll also notice that this knife has the scalloped handle, or scalloped blade rather, and what that means is that there's little pockets that air will actually get stuck in these as you're slicing, and kind of help to keep stuff from sticking to the blade, like cheeses, or uh, meats for example. This is a different take on the Santoku knife; you'll see this one is almost completely straight, the difference on this one, that you'll see that on this, we have a uh, a nice flat edge here on the corner, where on this one, we have a nice curved edge down here. So what that means, is that this knife has a little more rock to it, right here, it's got a little belly on the knife, and what that means is that this for all intents and purposes is kind of it's all the good parts of this, as far as longer cutting surface, and, and actual utility of the blade with the scalloped edge. But, it has the advantage of this, in the fact that you can cut all the way down to the tang, unlike this where it kind of stops. Um, this also does have a unique handle on it, that facilitates grabbing it differently; but that's just by design of this particular blade, so, uh, let's move on now to our other knives."