Every house needs a set of good quality knives, because good knives can help you preparing your meal quicker and a lot easier, besides a good knife will last longer. Even if you always buying fast food or like to eat outside at the restaurant, but someday somehow you are going to need this kitchen instrument. If you want to know how to buy a good kitchen knife best suited to your daily need, please read this article.
If you go to your local retail stores or browsing the online store, you will see lots of types, shape and sizes of knives available with its own purpose. Of course you don’t have to buy everything. You need to decide what kind of knife you need based on what you do in the kitchen. Do you need purpose-made knife or a knife that is able to handle most kitchen tasks? Well, the answer is depends on your activity.
Before deciding what type of knife you need, it is better that you recognize the knife that is known and you will see it stores nowadays.
Common Kitchen Knives
- Chef’s Knife or Cook’s knife or French’s knife; all purpose knives.
- Paring; all purpose knives for completing small complex task such as peeling or making small decorative garnishes.
- Bread knife: like the name; designed for cutting through soft bread’s crusted top without crushing the softer center. The blade is serrated – a saw-like bladed. It is also ideal to slice tomatoes.
- Butter knife; a dull knife usually for spreading butter on bread.
- Boning; use to remove bones from cuts of meat, available in stiff type for pork and beef, and flexible type for fish and fowl.
- Fillet; boning knives specially made for fish preparation.
- Carving; made specially to slice meat into smaller and thinner cut. Carving knife is wider and shorter than slicer.
- Slicer; similar with carving in its purpose but narrower and longer. In slicing meat, slicer can result in thinner and more precise cut than carving knife. That’s why chef would prefer this. Ham Slicer knife is also available to get better result in slicing ham.
- Cleaver; big, heavy-weight, almost-rectangular knife use to cleaving meat and bone. Because of its weight, the cooks can split meat with a swift stroke. A Chinese chef’s knife that looks like cleaver or also called Chinese cleaver is not really a cleaver at all, because it is design as a slicer.
Other knives will not be used as often as above, but if you like to cook anything and like to experiment in making any types of meal, you are going to need specialized knives, such as Cheese knives, small knives, and knives available for only particular food (tomato, grapefruit, chestnut, oyster, etc.).
For kitchen day to day basis, I think it is more than enough to prepare with the basic knives set, containing a small chef’s knife, large chef’s knife, paring knife, bread knife, carving knife and carving fork knife. You can add your collection sooner or later. If you care to find long lasting knives, then choose a good quality one based on knife’s material and construction.
Knives construction quality depends very much on the knife's material and blade manufacturing. Blade can produce by one these two processes.
1. Forged
Blades are made in multi-step process by skilled manual labor. Solid or powdered steel alloy lump heated to very high temperature, and pounded while hot to form the blade. The blade is then heated above critical temperature depend on alloy type, quenched in an appropriate quenchant, and tempered to the preferred hardness. After forging and heat-treating, the blade is polished and sharpened. Forged blades typically thicker and heavier than stamped blades.
2. Stamped
Stamped blades made by cutting cold-rolled steel to shape, heat-treated for strength, then ground, polished, and sharpened. Simpler than forging process makes the blade cheaper, but it is lacked in durability and strength. Stamped blades are not preferred by professional chef.
Knives quality also can be looked at how the tang made. Tang is the end part of the blade which connects to knife’s handle. Tang construction will benefit the strength and balance of your knife.
Types of tang
1. Full Tang; tang runs the full length of the handle, follows its shape and is secured by rivets along its entire length. This helps to provide strength and balance and is a feature for the serious cook to look for.
2. Half Tang or Neb Tang; suitable for general work. The tang extends part way along the handle, from about halfway to as much as three quarters of the way. It is secured by rivets but usually the rivet furthest way from the blade is only cosmetic.
3. Whittle Tang; suitable for lightweight work, tang have only a short point which extend into the handle and cannot be seen.
Also take note in blade’s grind type. There are two types of blade’s grind.
1. Hollow ground; only the bottom part of the blade is ground to form a cutting edge. Not as strong or durable as taper ground blades.
2. Taper ground or flat ground; means that the whole blade is ground, from the back of the blade to the cutting edge and from the handle end to the tip. This produces a blade with a fine sharp and very strong cutting edge. Taper ground blades are the best quality.
Summary
To make it short, if you want to look for a kitchen knife or kitchen knives set, you need to examine these things, blades material and knife’s construction. Compare and choose the best that fits your daily needs and - of course - your budget.
