Kitchen Knives – Kitchen Knife Sets and Care
Using the right kitchen knife for the right task is an important part of food preparation. Learn more about the different kitchen knives to complete your knife set.
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There are seven basic types of kitchen knife in a complete kitchen knife set:
- Chef knife: This type of kitchen knife has a heavy, long blade and a sharp edge. It is used for chopping, mincing, and dicing fruits and vegetables. These are available in the French style or Japanese kitchen knife style.
- Boning knife: This is a kitchen knife used to remove bones from the flesh of meat like poultry, fish, and ham. It is a shorter knife with a flexible, curved blade.
- Bread knife: A bread knife is a longer knife, about ten inches long, with a serrated blade. The serrated blade is good for sawing through bread crusts without dulling the blade, and cutting the bread without crushing it.
- Paring knife: This kind of kitchen knife has a short, sharp blade, used for peeling fruits, or making decorative garnishes out of fruits and vegetables.
- Filet knife: A filet knife has a flexible, curved blade, and it is used for cutting meats and fish into thin filets.
- Utility knife: A utility knife is somewhat smaller than a chef knife, about five to eight inches long. It is used for cutting meats and cheeses.
- Steak knife: This type of kitchen knife usually comes in a set. They are good for cutting tough foods into manageable bites. They have short, often serrated, blades, and are often used in table settings.
There are three basic materials used for making kitchen knives: steel, titanium, and ceramic.
Most kitchen knives are made from stainless steel. Stainless steel contains chromium, which has the benefit of making the knife blade resistant to tarnish and rust. The drawback to stainless steel is it dulls more quickly than high carbon steel.
High carbon steel is preferred by some professional chefs for its greater edge retention and hardness, but it tends to discolor with use. Knives made from surgical stainless steel have even higher chromium content than regular stainless steel, and should be avoided because they dull very quickly.
Ceramic knives are harder and sharper than steel knives, but they are also slightly more expensive. A ceramic knife is typically made from zirconia, a high-carbon substance second in hardness only to diamonds. They have excellent blade retention if used on a wood or acrylic cutting board, but can chip if used on a hard surface like glass or marble. Also, because ceramic knives are sensitive to heat and friction, they can only be sharpened by professionals.
Titanium knives are less common than the other two, but its strength, flexibility, and resistance to corrosion make it a good material, particularly for boning and filet knives.
Knives should be sharpened on a sharpening steel before each use. Periodically, they should be sharpened using a home knife sharpener of at a professional knife sharpening service.
To save knives from dulling, it is best to store them in a knife block rather than in a drawer. Many premium knife companies, like KitchenAid knives or Forschner-Victorinox knives, sell knife sets complete with a block for less than it would cost to buy each knife individually.
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