Learn How to Use a Knife and Which One to Use for What

These first few posts are gonna seem super pedantic but whatever, consider it the instruction manual you should read before you push the “on” button to your kitchen. I’ll mix it up with my next post just to cut the monotony.

Know Your Knife’s Edge!

There are basically two kinds of knives. OK, there’s more than that, but here is the thing that’s important about them: the edge. Makes sense, right? The part that cuts is pretty fucking important. European style knives (the most common) have a double bevel edge that is somewhere between 15 and 20 degrees. Confused? Doesn’t matter, I am gonna just move to the other type: Japanese or Asian. Often Japanese knives have a single bevel with a much slighter degree, usually 12 to 14 degrees, and less even. There are Japanese (or Asian) style knives that have double bevels. There are thousands of variations on these two basic edges. There are also tons of different bevel angles, too. For reference, I like my boring-as-hell Victorinox knives just fine. Hint: they are European-style.

Know Your Knife’s Edge: Part Deux!

So, another thing. Most of us are familiar with two basic edge types: regular (or whatever it’s called) and serrated. There are specializations within those two edge types, but they are basically the most common. Serrated knives are used to slice bread, halve cakes to make layers, smaller ones can make cutting an orange supreme-style easier, and some even advocate using them to cut tomatoes (I’m looking at you Martha Stewart). I pretty much never make cakes, and I can supreme an orange with a regular paring knife just fine. I basically just use my long serrated knife to slice bread – which is fine because I bake bread frequently.

Know Your Knife’s Purpose!

What is the big one for, that has the non-serrated edge? It’s probably what is most commonly called a chef’s knife. They are 7 to 10 inches long, generally speaking, and they are the workhorse knife. You will chop nearly everything with this knife. I can bone a chicken with mine, although there are special knifes for boning as well. You know what they are called?

Boning knives. Pretty uninspiring name, right? It’s nothing like the “chef’s knife” which sounds like it might actually transform you into a real chef. It’s bullshit, of course, you don’t know shit about any of this, and wielding a knife with a mystical name is not gonna improve your non-existent cooking skills. A boning knife is handy, especially for filleting fish because it has a less thick blade that bends. This allows one to follow the contours of odd shaped bones.

Paring knives! Also, uninspiring. You’d think marketers would come up with better names. You know, like a name that sounds faintly exotic but is really just marketing bullshit. Kinda like Haagen Dazs ice cream. Look it up. The paring knife: “trims (something) by cutting away its outer edges.” That’s right folks, much like cast iron pans being replaced by inferior non-stick skillets, the paring knife has largely been replaced by vegetable peelers. Which, thank fuck, because I would never make another apple pie if I had to peel all those fuckers with a paring knife. The only person who can do this and look like it’s second nature is Jacques (fucking) Pepín (pronounced peh-pan, kind of). But they are useful for cutting cheese, sectioning fruit (after you’ve peeled it with a vegetable peeler), cutting small amounts of veggies (cherry tomatoes) and yeah, peeling shit. As I mentioned above, there is such a thing as a serrated paring knife which makes a orange supreme easier apparently, but meh, I don’t have endless space in my knife block.

Slicer. Again, wow, guys, couldn’t come up with something better? Like, Surgical Laser Precision Single Blade Shearer? Too many syllables, I suppose. Anyways, I find a chef’s knife can carve my prime rib just fine, but some people swear by them. They are usually quite long (12 inches?), have scalloped sides (to keep whatever you are slicing from sticking to the blade) and rounded ends (I suppose that this is so that if you are slicing up something really fucking huge, there isn’t a sharp blade end that will catch in the meat, or whatever, and interrupt your perfect thick ass slab of brisket). Ok, there are so many other types of knives, but I will save that for volume two: For People Who Think They Know What They Are Doing and Just Can’t Stop Buying Expensive Kitchen Shit.