Help me rationalize my knife collection

Cafe Society
1

So, for uninteresting reasons related to having to do with having had multiple households/storage across the world that has FINALLY coalesced into one home, I have a ridiculous number of knives. Notice I did not say “quality knives.” Just knives.

Now I need to pare down (heh heh) the collection, and I have no idea on what basis to keep or discard knives of similar blade size. Note: I recently acquired an electric knife sharpener, which is awesome. But I don’t know which knives are worthy of it and - other than the obviously flimsy specimens bought in an emergency at a random grocery story - which knives I should not bother to keep.

I never went out of my way to research and acquire high-end knives, so most likely none of the knives are super fantastic quality. (Though I have a Chinese cleaver bought in Boston’s Chinatown circa 1978 that I think is really, really great.)

A lot of the knives don’t seem to be identified by brand, which isn’t very promising. Many of those that are are Henckel, Anolon, or Fusion.

So how do I evaluate? Brand? Weight/heft? Shine? Blade thickness? What the handle is made of? I really don’t know.

Any guidance on “how to tell the difference between a knife worth keeping (and sharpening with your sharpener) versus one that should just go on the local free table” would be appreciated. I need to cut the collection down (heh) by at least one half, maybe two thirds. At the moment I’m staring at an absurdly large collection of random knives.

2

Take a personal poll over a month. The 10 you use most often, keep.
Keep a couple cheapies for that ball of twine, when the scissors are not where you left them.

Keep one under your mattress, for well, I don’t know. Just in case.

Keep one in the garage. Again, you just never know.

Keep one if the neighbor wants to borrow one for their cook out. You’ll never see it again.

Keep one in the trunk of your car. Wait. Best not do that.

3

You really only need 4 decent knives - an 8 or 10 inch chef’s knife, a serrated bread knife, a 4 inch paring knife and your cleaver. Lots of people don’t use cleavers and don’t need one but you use one so keep it. I use mine a lot even for vegetable prep. In fact I use it far more than I use a paring knife which, I guess, I could discard easily.

I would have knife Olympics. Put the knives in groups and battle it out meal by meal in a series of eliminations. No repechage - lose and you are gone.

4

Rate them as to how far they will sink into a green watermelon at 10 feet, then keep the top fifty percent.

5

If you want to know the value you need a pawn shop or auction house to assess the value.

I think most knives of value will have a history to them.

If all you have is a really nice knife you will lose money…I’d rather buy a new one than your used stuff.

Which isn’t to say you cannot get money for them You can. You just will not sell them for a profit unless you find a sucker.

6

That is I am sure good advice for a lot of people, but not for me. My plan for one day of cooking may include 6-8 dishes - stir-fries, casseroles, salads, elegant vegetable sides, a dessert, etc. (I cook fancy meals for home consumption and also cook a sort of once-a-week “meals on wheels” sort of delivery for a family). I do not have a dishwasher.

So, I need multiple versions of each frequently useable knife - say, 3-4 of each style. But at the moment, I probably have between 3 and 8 of each.

My question is not, “how many knives do I need?” but “How do I select the best among my many, many knives?”

“Knife olympics” is a fun idea but I would like to manage my knife collection within days, not months - if I can!

7

I have one, just one knife that is my favorite. I couldn’t tell you the brand. Lost since worn away.
I would start with that. I’m sure you have that one knife.

You really need a dishwasher if you’re cooking that much. Can you start a go fund me?
We cook lots, feed a bunch everyday. I have 2 dishwashers. I wouldn’t put my good knives in one any way. Any more than I’d put my good iron skillets in it.

8

Here’s an article with some ideas.

BTW, don’t ever put a good knife in a dishwasher. That’s a great way to ruin it.

9

I would keep the ones with reputable manufacturers names on them. The other ones come down to usefulness. Keep ones that you use. When they wear out replace with same or better. You can give away the others. Throw them out. Donate them. Or… throw them. Set up a target in the garage or backyard and when you feel like it. Toss them at it. Soon enough they will be unusable. Or you will get good at it.

If you have several of the same ones with good quality. Just store them away. You will eventually wear out their mates.

10

Money isn’t the problem - space is. My home was built c. 1978 on Hawai’i Island. It’s big, as these things go, but there is no space in the kitchen to add a dishwasher without giving up an unacceptable amount of storage space. (I like the creative thinking, though.)

11

I have used and owned a lot of kitchen knives over the years. I agree that having backups is a good idea. My personal collection right now is something like 14-15 — two each of eight-inch chef’s knife, ten-inch chef’s knife, santoku-style chef’s knife, and bread knife, plus two carving knives (short and long) and a handful of paring knives. And I would get rid of the santoku knives because I don’t use them, except my wife prefers them.

Which is a key consideration, I think. I don’t believe there’s an objective set of criteria by which one knife can be judged superior to another, separate from and overriding one’s own preferences. Assuming that they’re all reasonably well manufactured and aren’t, like, rusty or something, what really matters here is whether or not you like them.

So if I were in your shoes, I’d sort them into categories, and then I’d make a conscious effort to use each knife in the category and decide which ones I like best: which fit my particular hand, which have the best weight for my particular cutting technique, and so on. It’d be pretty obvious pretty fast which knives I favor, and which I don’t like using.

And if, after this test, it turns out it doesn’t matter, if they all basically work equally well for me, then I’d just arbitrarily get rid of some, and not think about it again. I’d have knives I like, and fretting about what I might have lost would just be a waste of energy.

12

I think only three knives are really “necessary” in any kitchen. Anything else is just a bonus.

  • Chef’s knife
  • Paring knife
  • Serrated knife

The serrated knife is kinda optional too. Great for bread and a few other things but, really, a chef’s knife and paring knife will get 90% or more of the things you want done in the kitchen.

13

Oh, I don’t care one whit about the financial value. All I care about is: let’s say I have four knives with 7" blades and I’ve decided I only need two of them. How do I decide which two to keep?

14

Thank you! This is what I’m looking for.

And for all the people reading (and making helpful suggestions - thank you all) maybe I should be a little clearer about the situation. Basically, it’s like being set down in front of a ginormous pile of random knives, and needing to pick out the 1/3 or so of the collection you want to keep.

I know what types of knives I want (broad- and narrow- bladed paring size, Chinese cleaver, small serrated, bread knife, mezza luna, etc.) but I have quite a few of each. And I don’t necessarily remember how well I liked any of them - what I’ve got is more like “a bunch of knives I used 10 years ago in Cairo,” plus “knives I put in storage after I spent a couple of summers in Hawai’i” and “knives I’ve been using over the past three years but I don’t know how they compare to older knives I had in storage” so forth. My memory for kitchen and cooking related things is actually weirdly good (I can often remember which page of which cookbook a recipe that I have not cooked in a decade or more is on), but it isn’t THAT good.

I want to know, basically, this: let’s say I have five paring knives in front of me. I only want to keep 2, or three at most. I don’t want to individually test all of them if I can help it, because it’s going to take too long, given that I probably have over 100 knives in all to chose among.

How can I narrow down my selection by spotting tell-tale signs of quality or lack thereof?

15

Start by breaking down by size / type. Given a pile of 5 to 15 of, say, paring knives, where I wanted the “best” three I’d …

  1. Pitch the grocery store cheapies without further thought. It says “Ecko”? Gone. It’s the largest, smallest, or weirdest shape of the bunch? Gone.

  2. Inspect them for obvious damage. Big nicks, bent blades, rust spots, flimsy blades compared to the others, serrations that are mostly worn off or uneven. Loose handles, wood is stained or has shrunk leaving raised rivets, etc. Pitch any that don’t pass with flying colors. “Maybe OK” really means “pitch it.”

  3. Evaluate the handles for which ones fit your hand well and which don’t. When my second wife and I combined households I had all nice Henckels; she had all nice Wustoff. Neither of us could stand the feel of the other’s handles. The fact our hands were about double or half the size of the other person’s had a lot to do with it. So we kept both. Good thing, since a while later we separated households again. To our mutual relief. In your case probably some will suck, most will be meh, and a couple will be “wow, this is great!”. Keep that last couple and pitch the rest.

  4. If you still have too many, start looking at brand names or nostalgia value. Or sturdiness of blade, where again some will suck, most will be meh, and a couple will be “wow: there’s the beef!”

16

I understand your pile o’ knives and your lack of time to work through it, but:

Tell-tale signs of knife quality are:

How well does it work? Meaning, how well does it fit your hand, your cutting style and cutting mediums, plus how easy is it to sharpen, how sharp it gets and how long it stays sharp.

As you are not interested in any money off the knives, and you only want to find out which are the best for you, I don’t see any way out of it other than using the knives, which gives you all the info you need, or can have.

I have prolly 30 knives, around 10/20 in / out of the kitchen, but brand name or even price doesn’t have much to do with knife quality to me, doing the knifey things I do. Practise will tell which ones are keepers.

There have been times when I thought I had an ok knife for task X, but once I got a much better knife for me, I realized I didn’t know how good it could be. And it did not come down to brand or price.

If you have a couple hundred knives, but you need only a few, and you don’t have lots of time to put into this:

I would start going through the pile quickly selecting the various types of knives you need, using the knives for a while, and once you had your wanted number of different type knives that felt good in the hand, turned sharp and stayed that way for a good while, I’d keep those and toss the rest.

Knives last for decades and good knives are a pleasure to use. I would think spending some time on this, doing knifey stuff with different knives, would be time well spent.

17

These are kitchen knives? I don’t understand needing multiples of each type. You don’t have a wet sponge? (You shouldn’t be putting knives in the dishwasher anyways)

18

Make a big pile. Or several, divided by some category like size or type you find relevant. Next time you cook, take one knife when you need it. Use it. Is it good? Keep it. It isn’t? Put it aside in a big box. Next knife, and repeat. If you use several knives in parallel when cooking you should sort through your pile in a couple of weeks at the most.
Then take the big box and get rid of it. Or make some kind of art with it: buy a big rag doll or a giant teddy bear or a Santa and stick all those knives in it at weird angles and nail it (them?) to a wall or a tree. People will steal the knives and you got rid of them.

19

Your analysis ought to end with the observation, “This knife - will KILL!” :smiley:

20

Chose the one of each type that feels best in your hand when you use it. Who cares who manufactured it?

There’s no need to ridiculously over complicate things.