Hello,
I am getting tired of the stainless kitchen knives that we have and I want to get some old school knives. I realize that my best bet is to go to flea markets/jumble sales, but failing that – Is there an e-tailer that sells reasonably priced 1095 knives.
1095 is an alloy designation for a steel with 0.95% carbon
I don’t know what grade steel they use, but inexpensive knives (the ones that have wooden handles with a brass ring at the tang) that can be bought at Chinese markets take an incredibly sharp edge. And, they rust nicely.
I got a very nice cleaver at a Chinese market – it will rust nicely too and it is hand forged. It is the kind of cleaver that you’d use to joint a water buffalo and I will probably never use it. It was $10, so no great loss.
Unfortunately, the nearest decent Chinese market is >150 miles away. I can’t even get kim chee at the one here. And I do not recall anything but the cheap stainless. Maybe in Atlanta?
I do not belittle your suggestion. It is a great idea that I’d not thought of.
Good knives are like good diamonds. If they’re cheap, they’re only pretending to be good.
It’s been a very long time since I bought good knives (OK, actually never - my wife bought them before we got married. So the Henckels knives are 20+ years old now). Today, those kinds of knives run about $60-100 each for the “reasonably priced” brands. Start with knives for the two sizes you use most often, or see if there’s a good kit that sells at a discount (sometimes kits are half price compared to buying each separately). Supplement your collection with cheap knives until you can afford to fill in the rest.
Go new school get the kyocera ceramic knives. I have had mine for about 7 years and only recently had to send it in for sharpening. Every body I have introduced these to loved them. They are basically the same price as good quality stainless steel knives.
I second this, despite having never used them. Everything I hear about ceramic knives make them sound like the perfect solution for a discerning home cook. They’re not as good for commercial use because they can chip or break over time, but…I’m not a commercial cook.
If I didn’t buy a pair of nice Shun Classics a couple years back, I’d be buying some Kyoceras.
That is absolutely not true. Any solid kitchen supply store will sell you one of these for a fraction of the cost of a Wusthof or Henckels knife.
Most people who own German cutlery for private use don’t have any idea what to do with them anyway.
The knife you link to is a good knife and will do perfectly for most people. If the OP was out buying his first knife and didn’t know what to get, I’d recommend starting with something like that over something like Henckels.
But I do believe you get what you pay for in high-end knives, and I think the kind of person who can say “I need a better knife” is the type who will get their money’s worth out of it.
While I would tend to agree with the latter, the Sani-Safe and other commodity-grade knives, while functional and well suited to commercial kitchens where anything not nailed, welded, and padlocked down will be stolen before second shift, are not really great for fine slicing and detailing work, and certainly won’t hold an edge as well as high grade Cr-Mb-V knives. Most restaurants use these knives until they get too dull to use and either toss them or run them through one of the edge grinder sharpeners that puts a micro-serrated edge that functions well for a few days and then becomes rolled. All of the career cooks I worked with owned either high carbon or stainless knives from Germany or France, and kept a careful eye on them. (Once cook I knew wore three knives in sheaths on his belt.)
In terms of stainless versus carbon steel, while there are a lot of variables, stainless knives tend to take and hold edges better than most carbon steel knives, and at least among the good quality knives stainless tends to be more consistent in regard to hardness and heat treatment. Stainless gets a bad rep because if the heat treatment is bad or the steel is of particularly poor quality (like the 420 and AUS-6A stainless used in inexpensive blades) then the knife will just not take a good edge. The really hard stainless knives will take and keep a wicked edge but don’t easily resharpen with a natural stone or hard steel. A diamond abrasive stone (like DMT) is required for sharpening and maintaining these knives. In contrast, even fairly cheap low grade carbon steel like 1045 will take a good edge with decent heat treatment and is easily resharpened but will not retain the edge as long or as well as a hard stainless.
In terms of finding good quality carbon steel knives, good luck. Last time I checked Chicago Cutlery still made a line of carbon steel knives but ChiCut has some pretty variable quality control (though I had a decent set of stainless ChiCut knives that I used for years before I bought a new set of Ikons). In general, you get what you pay for in kitchen cutlery; the stuff you buy off a vendor’s table for $5 is basically surplus spring steel; the $20 blades are suitable for journeyman work, and the $100 knives have well controlled heat treatment and adequate hardness for frequent use without having to continually sharpen or steel them.
One point of note is that it is far easier to regularly touch up knives on a fine stone or strop than to let a knife get dull and have to retrain the edge. If you do this on even the hard Japanese stainless knives regularly you can go several years without a full sharpening regime.
Stranger
In my experience, they are made available to the kitchen staff in certain places where most of the cooks don’t own a lot of their own knives. The sharpening service would come in once or twice a week and put a new edge on all of them in the catering company I worked for, but I was the only person there with my own set of knives.
They aren’t ideal for high-end restaurant work, but they are extremely well suited for the home cook. The German blades may be much better knives, but your average amateur isn’t going to see very many of their benefits chopping the equivalent of 2 onions and a couple of chicken breasts per day. With one or two professional sharpenings per year, they last a very long time. On top of that, they can be run through the dishwasher.
For both safety and sanitary reasons no cutting knife should ever be run through a dishwasher. A knife should be cleaned once it is used (especially if it is used to cut poultry or fish) and returned to rack or sheath.
Stranger
Nonsense. From F. Dick’s website:
You misunderstand. Leaving a used knife out on the counter just encourages cross-contamination. In some kitchens color-coded knives are actually used for different materials (one for poultry, one for beef and pork, another for “wet” vegetables, et cetera) to prevent this, but this isn’t really practical or necessary for a casual cook, who should just clean the knife immediately after use. Also, putting the knife in a dishwasher invites poor handling technique and the possibility of slicing one’s hand open unless the dishwasher has a dedicated cutlery tray (many don’t).
I think we’re having what amounts to a semantic disagreement; cheap, commercial grade knives will serve for most casual cooks who aren’t doing any fine slicing or a lot of cutting, and in fact most of my paring/utility knives and bread/sandwich knives are all commercial grade Dexter-Russell knives because they aren’t required to hold a fine edge and can put up with the kind of abuse that these knives see without heartbreak if the blade is chipped or rolled. The rubber handle is particularly desirable on paring and utility knives that are often used with wet hands, and the offset handle on the serrated bread knife is better than the inline bread slicers provided by most high-end makers. However, for fine slicing, sushi and sashimi prep, vegetable chopping, and meat trimming which require delicate or forceful cutting, I pull the the Wustof Ikon santoku, chef’s knife, and boning knives out of the knife hod because their sharpness and ergonomics are far superior to commercial knives. (I had a D-R santoku, and while it worked okay, it was vastly inferior in weight and ergonomics to the Ikon santoku.) When I bought a friend a knife for her birthday to supplement her Cutco (crap) knives, I got her an Ikon santoku which she reluctantly admitted was superior to any knife she’d ever used, even for the modest amount of cooking that she does. (She also pointed out that while the knife was technically a gift to her, it was actually just a ruse for me to keep a knife at her house that I found usable. She was right; I’m tricky that way.)
I would agree that the large block sets that people like to display in a kitchen patterned after a Williams-Sonoma ad are largely a waste of money, and for someone who does little more than casseroles and mushroom cream soup over chicken breast and rice, commercial quality knives are more than adequate. But for anyone who does any real cooking, and especially vegetable prep or working with whole poultry or joints of meat would be well served by using high grade kitchen cutlery. But to each his or her own; the best tool is the one at hand that will do the job safely and effectively.
Stranger
Again, I’ve never disputed the relative value of the two classes of knives. I maintain that the kind that you and I own & have used professionally are of a much higher quality. I just don’t think they’re a good buy for a home cook on a budget, which was my original point.
There’s another reason not to put knives in the dishwasher, and that’s that the rattling around in there can cause the blades to smack into other pieces of cutlery, dulling it pretty quickly and causing it to need to be sharpened.
Actually the abrasives alone in the dishwashing detergent are bad for knives with a fine edge.
Third reason not to wash knives in the dishwasher, at least if the basket is plastic-covered steel wire: The knife edges can nick the plastic and expose the wire, causing it to rust. The rust doesn’t seem to do anything much, but it discolours the plastic and looks unsightly. Cite: Dishwasher belonging to my parents.
I only have two things to add. Don’t bother with buying a set. Figure out which knives you’ll actually use and buy them individually. Also, try to get to a store to try them. How they feel in your hand can make a big difference.
That’s the primary reason, assuming you don’t have a place to securely put your knives in the dishwasher. Layig a large knife flat on a top shelf of a household dishwasher is usually fine.
I have no reason to believe this is anything other than a huge myth. The best I’ve ever seen is a generic warning against it, but even Wusthof claims that many of their knives are dishwasher safe. The only real certainty is that many knives have handles that are damaged with repeated use in the dishwasher.