Choosing Slicing Knives & Cleavers

Video Transcript

"My name is Brandon Sarkis, on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'd like to speak with you about what to look for when buying kitchen knives. Here we see, uh, this would fall in kind of the other range; you're going to have your long slicer, like your carving slicer; uh, you're going to have your bread knife, typically serrated; and you're going to have your cleaver. Um, these are all three knives that you can certainly buy and get use out of; you just won't use them all the time. Um, slicers typically though are going to be fairly dull, surprisingly; and they're going to have little pockets, or the scallops, also known as the Granton Edge, up the entire length of it. That is on, it's going to be on both sides too, that's to help from, that's to keep things from sticking to the blade as easily. And typically you'll find, that they've got a little bit of flexibility in the blade. The difference between the slicer and the bread knife, bread knives typically don't really much have a point, but they do have a nice, pretty mean serration on here, and that's actually to saw through thicker crust, without actually smashing the loaf of bread. You should be able to take a good bread knife, and just kind of saw through and not have any problems, without smooching your loaf of bread down. So, um, once again you can certainly slice a loaf of bread any different knives I've shown you, but this a specialized knife for slicing bread. Lastly, everyone's favorite, the cleaver. Everyone I know that goes out and buys one of these is happy they own one, and then they realize they use it once every year, so. These are great, if you ever need to take apart like, a whole lamb, or a cow, or split chicken carcasses, or chop a turkey stuff like that. Other than that, there's not a whole lot here that can't be done with a good chef's knives. But the advantage is if you don't want to ruin the blade on your chef's knife, then your cleaver works just fine. Typically also you'll see that cleavers have a much wider angle on the blade, you'll see that it's a much thicker blade, too. So, it takes a lot, it'll take a lot more of a beating before it gets dull. And typically cleavers aren't that sharp, they rely more on the actual weight of the cutting action to cut through it, than the actual design or shape of the blade."