We cover everything from paring and chef knives to butchering sets in Japanese and German styles. We also throw in steak and cheese knives for good measure. Come find suggestions and full reviews on professional-level cutlery for whatever chef condescends to browse around here, or more budget-friendly kitchen knives for the home cook desperately searching for the best knife set to help them get prepared for holiday meals.
We aren’t what you’d call professional cooks, but we do know some and most of the knives we write about and recommend we have tested extensively ourselves. When we review professional knives we draft a chef to help out. Fortunately for us most chefs love to test new knives almost as much as they like to offer opinions.
There are some expensive brands in here like Shun and Wusthof, and some significantly cheaper brands like Victorinox, and we say mostly helpful things about all of it, if you care to listen to a couple idiots who haven’t starved to death and still have all their fingers. talk about kitchen knives.
This is a Set of True Kitchen Essentials in a Very Tall Package Most chefs and knife makers (custom makers, anyway) will tell you that you only really need a chef’s knife, a paring, and a bread knife. And yet, most kitchen knife companies will push huge sets containing twenty knives insisting it gives you …
A Big Handled Kitchen Knife that Cuts Above Its Price Tag The Artisan Chef’s knife is the purebred Western knife in Cutluxe’s modest line up. Currently their other offerings are a more thin handled series with Swedish steel (the Olivery series), and a heavier-set series featuring harder Japanese steel (the Shinobi series). The key difference …
The Cooking Knife for the Off Roading Community The name of this thing might perk up the ears of someone who spends a lot of time climbing mountain sides in their trail rig. Off-road adventures checkered with fireside cookouts was apparently the use case in mind for the designer Jason Nicosa, who spends an enormous …
A High Class Western Chef’s Knife with a Hard Bite and Smooth Looks Cangshan has been putting out some great designs lately that showcase a genuine love and attention to detail with kitchen knives. The Thomas Keller series chef’s knife is the first one of their knives I’ve tested that felt like it was really …
When an American Outdoor Knife Company Goes Japanese Hybrid The Bradford chef’s knife is technically a gyuto. The blade certainly cuts like one. You could work it next to the Tojiro DP and watch it perform in roughly the same way. It’s very thin behind the edge and the edge has a subtle curvature that …
An Honest Look at the Modern Benchmark for German Kitchen Knives Pick out a random line cook, ask him what a good knife is and the odds are pretty good he’ll tell you to get a Wusthof Ikon. Most of the times I asked a cook or chef what knife they used or what they …
Bestech’s Weird Foray into Kitchen Cutlery Makes a Good Knife for Small Counters This knife is rustic and comfortable and odd for a lot of different reasons. Not least of which is that it’s made by a company started by Bestech, a name that should be familiar to anyone with a modern smooth-flipping folding knife. …
This is a Western Kitchen Chef Knife that Cuts like Japanese Knife What do you do with a knife like this? After hearing all the hype about Shun knives, and then hearing all the anti-hype people talk about what’s wrong with Shun knives, then watching a bunch of culinary YouTube influencers slap the Premier around …
Things Get Cool but Clunky When the Germans Make a Gyuto The Mizu is a pretty knife first, and a pretty good Japanese chef’s knife second. I want to be very clear about the cutting ability of this thing, because it looks like something that’s going to turn your kitchen into the setting for a …
The First Japanese Kitchen Knife with Some Western Toughness This is the knife that brought Japanese cutlery into western kitchens. It was also one of the best arguments that stamped blades aren’t worse than forged blades by default. The G-2 was groundbreaking in the 80’s, and it still holds its own pretty well today, although …
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