Free shipping on orders over $100 - Excluding konro grills
Free shipping on orders over $100 - Excluding konro grills
February 13, 2024 4 min read
Anthony Bourdain taught a younger version of me that a serious cook only needed four knives: a paring knife, a chef’s knife, a flexible boning knife, and an offset bread knife. He wrote in Kitchen Confidential that he really liked Global Knives, so I bought Globals. They were my first non-European knives, and I loved them. Prior to that, I used Victorinox knives—ordered through Chef Hans Anderegg with rosewood handles—and loved them, too. My first knife to call my own is a now-ragged 10” Sanelli, its chunky green and red handle pockmarked from when my Great Dane stole it and tried to rob our dinner guests for pocket change and table scraps. I never loved that knife.
As a group of people who spend all day waxing poetic about Japanese knives, it’s hard to make time for knives from the rest of the world. Great blades come to us from Europe and North America, we sharpen them all and do a damn good job too, but it’s important to highlight some differences between Western and Japanese kitchen knives.
The most important distinction when comparing Japanese and Western-style kitchen knives is the balance of sharpness and maintenance or durability. Basically, a knife gets sharper the harder the steel gets—Japanese knives generally use harder steel—but harder steel is more brittle and easy to chip or damage. I find it helpful to think about knives as cars. A western knife is a Ford truck, a Japanese knife is a Ferrari, and sharpness is speed. An F-150 will never beat a Ferrari off the line, but you’re not afraid of potholes driving the truck.
So keep that old Wushtof or Victorinox around. They’re great backup to a more delicate blade, and having something sturdy around for your guests to use never hurts.
Chris is a relocated Maritimer that can be found slinking in and out the back doors of Ottawa's restaurants, often with his daughter in tow. Chris has been a fixture in the Ottawa food scene for the past 10 years and has recently laid down his apron to learn the ways of Knifewear. Chris loves cooking big pieces of meat over a live fire and spends his summer feeding wood into his BBQ, Lemmy Smoke-mister.
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