Cuts Like a Knife

While trolling the Web I noticed a post from someone on a "chef" site who mentioned that they had just purchased an expensive Henckels chef's knife and then purchased an expensive Henckels electric knife sharpener. This is analogous to purchasing an inkjet printer in many ways; the printer is cheap but the cartridges are horrendously expensive.

So Henckels wants you to purchase their expensive chef's knife and then quickly wear it down to a nub (it would only take a matter of months if you used their electric sharpener) then buy another one.

I have other beefs with Henckels, so to speak. What are you supposed to do with a chef's knife? Well, slice things, but far more, chop things. And the way to chop a lot of things is with the rocking motion--you leave the tip of the blade on the board and rock the rest of it over the food (and not your thumb, which I happily did yet again this week.)

Trouble is, the Henckels has a bolster on the blade--that's the thick metal girdle, or heel, that comes out from the bottom of the handle to form a thick ridge all the way to the cutting edge.

That means that if you use an electric sharpener, which is insane to begin with, you're going to end up with a chef's knife that is developing a gap between the heel of the blade and the board.

In fact, this will happen even if you use a stone (as I do) or a steel (those tubular metal rods with rough surfaces that butchers seem to love.) And that's exactly what happened to my Henckels after a couple of years. Then I found my garlic wasn't getting chopped as well.

So it seems silly to get a knife with a bolster and sillier to get an electric sharpener.

I have a Kasumi "Damascus steel" knife that's light yet deadly (it's not a santoku but is shaped pretty much like a regular chef's knife, but without the bolster.)

And I use a stone with one medium-coarse side and one fine. I find that it delivers a far more accurate edge--because you're carefully controlling the angle of the grind--than a steel, where your hand is going to twist slightly (unless you're a pro, which I'm not.)

A good article on chef's knives can be found here. And an excellent article by our very own Barry can be found here.

The guy says "when I run my finger along the blade I can actually feel it curve upward . . ."

Ouch. That really proves his case that he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer.