VIDEO: Kitchen Knives

Hi everybody! I am back today with part two of my essential workers of your kitchen series. Last time we talked all about pots and pans. Today we're going to be talking about knives. Knives is one of my favorite kitchen tools to talk about because I have a very strong opinion: Never buy a knife set. I really feel like a lot of people have this block of knives in their kitchen that they got as a set they maybe use one or two of them they have no idea what three or four of them are even for. It's just not a good way to spend your knife money. A much better approach would be to buy individual knives that suit your needs. I would argue that you really don't need a ton of individual knives. Let's go through the ones that I think every kitchen absolutely needs to have.

We'll start small. This guy is called a paring knife. This is going to be the smallest knife in your kitchen. It's good for quick tasks. It's good for things like cutting a piece of fruit or anything where you just need a really small, easy to clean, quick job. It's not meant to be your main knife. Every once in a while I'll see somebody trying to do major cutting with this. This is not a chopping knife! You're not going to cut an onion with this knife! But if you're just going to slice up an apple or take the pits out of cherries or things like that, this can be a good knife. I do think a paring knife is something that everybody should have.

Another one that I think is underappreciated is the bread knife. You'll notice that a bread knife has ridges. It's sometimes it's called a serrated knife. By the name “bread knife” you could probably figure out that it's good for slicing bread. The reason is that these little teeth are going to allow you to saw through the bread rather than squishing the bread. We don't want to put a lot of pressure on bread when we're cutting it. It's also good for things like tomatoes where if you put a lot of pressure on them you're just going to squirt all their juices everywhere. Instead you can gently saw through them without squishing them down. No other knife can do that. You have to have a sir or a bread knife in your kitchen. A nice long one like this is the way to go.

This next knife is slightly less necessary, but if you're going to have an extra knife around I would say it's this. It's sometimes referred to as a boning knife or a fish knife. It's very thin, it's actually quite flexible, you can kind of bend the blade. It's great for getting the skin off of meat raw meat, getting bones out of meats, a lot of more delicate tasks involving meat or fish. So I wouldn't say this is the knife you need to start with by any means, but if you are going to be cooking a lot of meat or fish it is a good knife to have. Super sharp, it just works better than your average knife.

Now a chef's knife, that is really the knife you MUST have. If I could have one knife it would be a chef's knife. I often joke that I should start traveling with my chef's knife because we go to a lot of Airbnbs and the knives at Airbnbs… I'm always the one who has to cook for the group and I'm like “I can't.” There will be, like this [paring knife], and I'm like “oh, I can cook for 12 with this?” No! You need a chef's knife. so this is my chef's knife. You'll notice it's a big knife. It kind of looks like a paring knife but much, much, much bigger. The way that you hold a chef's knife is actually to pinch the blade above the handle, then wrap your fingers around the handle. This is a knife you can really control. You can chop like this with it, you can just chop like this, it's just it's an all-purpose knife. There's nothing I really couldn't do with the chef's knife if push comes to shove. I think the important thing with a chef's knife is to pick the one, the brand and the size that fits you. I like to go to stores that will let me try them out. When my husband and I were first registering for wedding gifts we went to Sur la Table and they had potatoes and onions in the store and we were allowed to pull out all their chef's knives and practice cutting with the different knives. It was great because we actually ended up deciding we wanted different knives. The one on the bottom here, this is mine. It's a Wusthof. This one on the top is a Shun. The Wusthof is a German knife, a very, very heavy-duty workhorse knife. It'll last me my whole life, it's a great knife. Shuns are amazing. They're Japanese, and they have extremely thin blades. Sometimes I will steal his and I have to do some really precise cutting. But they're more delicate so you have to be careful. He has even a few chips in his blade because it is so thin and fragile. Chef’s knives can be pretty expensive so you have to decide what fits your hand the best what type of cooking are you doing. Are a lot of family members going be sharing the knife? Are you going to get your own? Regardless, you do want to look for a knife that has the blade as one piece through the whole handle. You don't want a blade attached to a rickety handle. Any good knife brand is going to be one piece of metal through the whole thing and then they just attach the handle on the sides. Definitely look for that. I'm the big Wusthof fan – every knife you've seen here with the exception of the Shun chef's knife has been a Wusthof. It's a workhorse brand, it's a high quality brand and it's pretty reasonably priced for a really high quality product.

Aside from the chef's knife the other thing that I probably get the most use out of in my kitchen is scissors. I do recommend getting scissors made by a knife brand because you'll get better quality. Make sure they come apart – it’ll make them easier to clean. I actually do a lot of basic tasks with the scissors. I chop green onions, I chop up my salad, I cut up chicken a lot of times with scissors. It's just easier. I love knives but if the scissors can do the job better by all means use the scissors.

The other thing I wanted to talk about is sharpening your knives. This is a honing steel. Honing steels don't actually sharpen your knives. They are worth having though. What they do is they line up the steel back into a straight line. So when you hone a knife you're not actually sharpening it, but it'll have the effect of sharpening it because it's realigning all of the metal. They do sell at-home knife sharpeners, but you have to understand that when you sharpen a knife, a little bit of metal is actually being removed every time. So it is kind of a delicate process – you could start to ruin your knives if you sharpen them incorrectly. I personally feel better taking my knives to be sharpened professionally. A lot of stores like Sur la Table, maybe Williams Sonoma, places like that have knife sharpening in-house. Our farmer’s market actually has a guy who sharpens knives, or if you live in a big city that has a knife depot type restaurant store, they'll usually have really cheap knife sharpening. I do recommend professional knife sharpening maybe once every year or two, but otherwise you could do the honing steel yourself every couple weeks just to make sure you're getting tip-top performance from your knife.

Alright, hopefully that answers everybody's questions about knives and you're not going go wasting your money on a bunch of mystery knives that serve no actual purpose!