Right before christmas I bought a set of Henckel’s Pro-S cutlery (12 pc, no steak knives) on special for 225. I haven’t opened it yet, as I was waiting to see how my christmas bills would come out. Yesterday, while at Costco, I spotted a 19-piece (includes 8 steak knives) Cuisinart set, made of High Carbon stainless steel, for 89 bucks.
Now I am torn, I don’t know if I should keep the henckels, or if the price difference is really justified. The cuisinart set is this one:
Obviously, I could save quite a bit of $ if I return the pro-s set, but if I am going to be disappointed with the cuisinart set, it would suck to miss out on the one-time deal with the pro-s.
For the record, I am not even an amateur chef, but someone slowly improving my skills in the kitchen.
Former chef checking in. I recommend taking the whole set back and just buying two knives: a 10" or 8" chef’s knife (depending on your comfort and hand size) and a 4" paring knife. The Henckel paring knife is perfect in just about every way; I’ve got one, and it’s my go-to knife for small jobs. I also own a Henckel cleaver, utility knife, and santoku, and used to have an 8" chef’s knife made by them, but gave it away to a girlfriend.
They make decent knives, but out of all of them I’d say only the cleaver and paring knife are truly worth the money, and I’m a bit up in the air on the cleaver. Their chef’s knifes are OK, but not quite up to my standard (then again, I’ve got a $250 chef’s knife that I sharpen weekly…) Wusthof’s “Grand Prix II” chef’s knives are on par price-wise with Henckel’s Pro line and about twice as good. You can pick up an 8" or 10" for about a hundred bucks.
So spend $150 on two really good knives instead of $220 on 19 knives. Either way, I guarantee you’ll just end up using the two. And no matter what you do, I can’t recommend the Cuisinart. A crappy knife is a dangerous knife, and their knives just plain suck.
Also, there’s only “no need to sharpen” if you’re not picky or don’t cook often. Just for thought, consider a magnetic strip for your knives. It’s safer, more hygenic, more space efficient, and well, just plain cool.
Personally I think the idea of having some surgical steel knives on your knife block that act as cutlery is an insult to the cook’s skills. All the meat I serve up can be cut with an ordinary stainless steel table knife.
SO I basically have a cutlery set Maxwell & Williams who sensibly sell sets and individual pieces and 3 knives that do all the heavy lifting - a chef’s knife, a safety paring knife (daringly sharp) and a boning knife. I get a surprising amount of use out of the boning knife but I’m sure a real chef wouldn’t need it for most of the stuff I do with it.
A good breadknife and some kitchen shears are the only other things I use. I use those cut through a shoe serrated knives for bread and buy cheap shears that I throw away as soon as they play up every couple of years.
My first impression of the Cuisinart knives is “Ugh… stainless steel?” They’ll be almost impossible to sharpen. And almost half of the set is steak knives?
Where did you find a 12-piece set of Henckels Pro-S for $225? Please tell us! I’m pretty fond of my Pro-S 10" chef knife, and that dude set me back about $80 on its own.
Another consideration is how the knives feel in your hand. If you’re not comfortable holding them, you won’t use them. Whatever the brand and handle style, a good knife for you will feel like an extension of your hand, rather than feel like a thing to hold. As an example, the Henckels 5-Star and Pro-S are almost identical blades in different handle styles. I **hate **the feel of the “ergonomic” 5-Star, and a 5-Star parer is a lonely orphan in the far corner of my knife block. It may be wicked sharp, but I just don’t like it.
“how it feels” is more a function of how you hold a knife. If you hold it properly, you’ll likely find Henckl knives tend to have too much weight in the handle. If you hold it by the handle, like most people do, you’ll find they work pretty well.
Influential Panda is absolutely correct. Take the set back. A good paring knife and a good chef’s knife should see you through pretty well anything you ever do. A cleaver is a nice addition, if you’ll use it. Certainly a knife must feel good in your hand, though. Sets of knives, like sets of pots, are usually not worth the money you pay for items you will never use.
I have a chef’s knife that I bought at a thrift store 30 years ago, it’s an old wooden-handled carbon steel that takes a deadly edge and holds it. I had a good paring knife which my son broke, and he bought me a Henckels paring knife that I wouldn’t trade for gold.
Stainless steel knives are basically useless, IMHO.
I have about 5 of the Pro-S knives. I use three of them: my 7" santoku, the paring knife, and the bread knife. The others just fill space in the block.
the chefs knife was supposed to be a never sharpen, the edge has a kind of super small serrated edge or something. I do cook, a lot. I have been using the thing regularly for around 15 years and its just now hitting the point where I am thinking of replacing it. trust me on this I hate a dull knife.
and the posters suggesting dumping the set and getting just a chefs and a pairing knife? yeah a good plan. I would say the chefs is the one I use close to 90% of the time, the pairing knife gets most of its use on potatoes, the only other knife I own is a sharp serrated knife for bread.
Although I agree with Influential Panda’s recommendation for just getting a chef’s knife and maybe one or two others, I can’t agree with him on his Henckel’s hate. I’m curious to what he defines “twice as better” as.
I have both Henckel’s and Wustofs, and to me, they’re interchangeable. I buy one or the other depending on how they feel in my hand. I tend to buy more Henckel’s than Wustofs.
Every review I’ve ever read of knives say that once you get into the high quality range, beyond that is personal. A lot depends on what handle fits your hands better; women tend to favor smaller handles than men.
My nephew, who recently graduated from culinary school in Las Vegas, said that he and others from his school prefer Global cutlery. He’s been working at a Japanese restaurant and loves his Global 7-Inch Hollow-Ground Santoku. When he has more money he plans to purchase more Global knives.
The above advice is on point; the only things I would possibly add are a ~6" boning/fillet/utility knife (good for deboning fowl and game, and for filleting fish if you do that), and a santoku if you do a lot of fine slicing. Along with an inexpensive serrated bread knife and some medical shears, this should provide for all cutlery needs in the kitchen.
Only if you purchase cheap stainless steel knives and don’t know how or care to spend the time to maintain good knives. Many lower end stainless steel knives use 440A or AUS-6 steel; some of the really cheap ones (those that advertise being made of “surgical” stainless) may even use 420 steel, which is highly corrosion resistant but basically impossible to hold a good edge. Good kitchen cutlery will be made of 440C or VG-10 “stainless”; this makes for good corrosion resistance, some degree of stain resistance, and high hardness and decent or better toughness. Of course, high hardness also means that it is more difficult train an edge, although once you’ve obtained a good edge you should be able to maintain it by just a few strokes on a hone once in a while. Most carbon steel knives will be easier to groom but will not hold an edge nearly as long as vanadium-alloyed steels, and the non-stainless “tool steels” that contain vanadium are rarely used for kitchen cutlery, although they’re often found in outdoor and utility knives.
Putting and keeping a proper edge on cutlery is a skill onto itself; using those little draw-thru hand sharpeners is fine if you don’t mind that they’re basically biting little chunks out of the blade to make it saw through food but the “edge” one obtains by doing so will not last long under regular use. The only proper way to get a sharp and robust edge on a flat ground or hollow ground blade is to use a flat hone or a straight hone aligning kit like that sold by Lansky, DMT, or Spyderco. (I think hone aligning kits are fine for smaller blades but I find them awkward with large edges because of the repositioning of the clamp or blade through the process.) For high hardness steels a diamond hone is a real timesaver as it will take away material far quicker than a natural stone of the same nominal grit.
Any claims of an edge that never needs to be sharpened are bunk. It’s true that serrations on a blade will focus the force into a smaller contact area and make the knife seem sharper than it really is, and for certain types of cutting (like bread) is advantageous, but this does not make a good edge for fine controlled slicing. Any business about “permanent micro-serrations” and so forth is absolute crap. It is true that if you grind away at a blade with an “automatic” hand sharpener per above you’ll get a usable edge but it won’t last long, and it will require eventually completely retraining the edge. The really hard vanadium steels will hold an edge for a long time–years, if you only use them infrequently–but this is because of the hardness and toughness of the steel, not because of some voodoo marketing claims about their proprietary edge grinding technique.
Chad Ward’s An Edge In The Kitchen is probably the bet in-print book I’ve found about buying and maintaining kitchen cutlery. The Complete Guide to Sharpening is the canonical reference with regard to tool and knife sharpening but says very little specifically in regard to kitchen knives. Both of these books go into semi-technical detail about how knives cut and what makes for a good edge. Tibbytoes, Global seems to have gotten an in with cutlery schools in the last ten years or so, and I’ve seen a variety of pop-cooks like Tony Bourdain hawking them, but I don’t find them all that special. I haven’t used them except to try them out, but the balance is just all wrong for me, and as the brand has increased in popularity the price has gone through the roof. I like the Wusthof Classic Ikon knives, which are also frighteningly expensive, but have pretty much all the features I like in a knife and are beautiful to boot (which no one will ever say about the Globals).
However, ever kitchen I have ever worked in provide cheap poly-handled knives that were basically intended to be used for a week and thrown away. While individual cooks might bring their own high quality knives, the amount of thievery in kitchens tends to cause a lot of professional cooks to keep their good knives at home and use the cheap ‘disposable’ knives in work kitchen. As with a lot of what culinary schools do, the promotion of big name knives is intended more to separate students from their cash than introduce them to the reality of commercial cooking.
“I used my chef’s knife to cut through a tin can, and was still able to fillet this cat I captured thanks to its irresponsible owner who let it outside!”
Stranger on a Train is right. But I’m happy with my old carbon steel knife and since I was taught by my Grandpa how to use a whetstone and a steel, I keep a nifty knife-edge on my knife. Likewise the ancient carving knife that is my husband’s treasure, it was his Dad’s. My husband can’t put an edge on it, but he carves beautifully. Hardly anyone can, these days.
When it comes to stainless steel cutlery, I mean table cutlery, not cutting cutlery, I have been looking for a new everyday set for some time. I refuse to buy Made In China, anything made in China out of steel is crap from the getgo. Yet cutlery sold by Oneida and Rogers, etc., is all made in China and why is that? I even almost ordered a set from Sheffield, but didn’t quite have the nerve to actually spend that sort of money for stainless steel tableware to be shipped to the far reaches of Western Canada.
Sometimes cheap is good, though. I have a cheap “mandoline” made by Starfrit that I bought at a garage sale for about $1 and have been using it with great satisfaction for many years. I don’t use it that often, since a sharp knife will do all it does, but when slicing 5 pounds of potatoes for scalloped potatoes or making coleslaw for a crowd, it works like a charm. The little blades on it are razor sharp and of course, have never been sharpened.
No one’s recommended this, but a surprisingly useful knife is a Chinese chef’s knife. It’s more like a cleaver, but with a round bamboo handle and a curved blade. Easy to sharpen with enough weight to ensure that even a slightly dull blade won’t be too much of an issue. And the large blade makes it more difficult to chop fingers off. Here’s one, all fancied up. Trust me on this, though: the cheap ones work every bit as well as the expensive ones. I can’t explain it, though. This rule doesn’t hold up with any other knife, but a Chinese chef’s knife is best when it’s cheap.
Go to a cutlery store and “test-drive” as many knives as you can.
I’ve had a chance to at least hold and mimic cutting with Henckels, Wustoff, Shun, and even Cutco (don’t laugh). People have been known to wax lyrical about the Shun, but I just didn’t like the feel of it in my hand. Henckels is fine, heck, even the Cutco ain’t bad. But, for me, the Wustoff just fit me better than the rest. I tried the 10 inch chef’s knife and could immediately “feel” its balance. (I could actually balance the blade on one finger on the bolster.)
As for all-out, the best knives around, I stand by my mother’s old blackened, high-carbon steel knives. I keep telling her to make sure they’re mine in the will, but she doesn’t think that’s funny, for some reason.
As for different types, again, I go with her’s: Big-ass Chef’s knife, boning knife*, two good paring knives, and a bread knife. Everything else is superfluous. (I have a Santoku, and it’s strictly a second-string player.) Steak knives are fine, but a decent set is just about as good as a great one, IMO.
*I actually use the boning knife for boning things. If you don’t prep as much, don’t bother.
I enthusiastically endorse Influential Panda’s recommendation of the Chinese Chef’s Knife. I’ve had a good cheap one for a couple of years, and as an enthusiastic home cook, it’s been amazingly useful and actually very easy to use.
The Henckel’s set was a black friday steal from walmart.com. I have taken it back, as I have become convinced that 225 is too much to spend out of my christmas budget for a set of knives that nobody thinks I need (especially my wife).
The Cuisinart set is still in my car, and the box describes the steel as high-carbon, no-stain steel, similar to the description given by Henckel’s (though I realize te steel is probably inferior).
I got the cuisinart set from costco, so for now, I am going to keep it and try it. If I don’t like it, I can take it back, and it can’t be any worse than the Farberware set I got for my wedding (6 years ago) that is stamped stainless and has seen countless trips through the dishwasher. I have used a smith’s sharpening kit to put an edge (of sorts) back on them, but they don’t hold it very well.
I saw a Wusthof Chef’s knife/Paring knife combo from the Grand Prix II line on Amazon.com for 99.95, the same price as the chef’s knife alone, so I may head down that route. I am also considering a warthog v-sharp system to sharpen my knives. I just don’t have much of a steady hand for using something like the spyderco sharpmaker, etc. the warthog looks pretty infallible. opinions on it?
I’m pretty fond of my Pro-S 10" chef knife, and that dude set me back about $80 on its own.