Holding Kitchen Knives: Part 1

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. I'd like to take a second to discuss the proper way to hold certain knives. Because there's no point in having a nice, fancy knife if you don't know how to hold it. First things first: the cleaver. Cleavers- the way you want to hold it is just like this. Put your thumb on this side, put your hand here. The reason being, because you want to get a nice full-on, like, I'm building a fence hammer schwing or whatever you're getting at. There's no need to hold it up here like this, all delicate, because that's not how you're going to use it. You're going to get just full-on just cleaver hacking away at it like that. You also want to make sure that your knuckle doesn't extend further down than here; otherwise you're going to whack your knuckle against whatever you're doing. So, be careful with that when picking out your cleaver. Now for your bread knives and you?re slicing knives: typically, you're going to- it's kind of a hybrid grip. You're going to kind of put a finger here, or a finger on top. Thumb on the other side to hold the blade. So you're going to get up on top of it, like you would a chef's knife, but you're going to kind of do this, depending on what you're cutting. If you're cutting bread, and your finger will sink that into it. You know, if you have like a big loaf of bread like this, you can just hold it like this. Just hold it like you would normally hold a regular knife, but don't actually grip upon the blade, because if you do that, you're going to run your fingers into whatever you're cutting. So you know, you get your bread, you know, you go like this, and there you go. Now, here's where I see a lot of mistakes. Chef's knife. This knife has actually- has a specially designed handle to kind of force you to hold it a certain way. You can't hold this knife very well like this, because you'll end up holding it out, with your wrist out. This knife- on a chef's knife, you're supposed to put your finger right here, like this. Put your thumb on the other side, and so you're holding it in your fingers like that. You bring these fingers back here and that allows you to really maximize the amount of control you have over your blade. The idea being is that you're in full control of what's going on."