In the movie Julie & Julia, there’s a scene where Julia Child and a fellow chef are lamenting the introduction of stainless steel knives into kitchens 'round the world.
What did they use before the 50’s if not stainless steel?
I understand that stainless steel alloys and heat treating techniques have come a long way since the '50s.
Just a guess, it but might be high carbon steel. It will rust if you don’t take care of it, but it sharpens much easier than stainless.
Lots of people own expensive SS knives. Very few people are able to sharpen them properly.
A properly trained chef would never need a stainless steel knife because they clean and wipe dry their knives immediately after use, so they weren’t just lamenting stainless steel knives, but also the lack of training they represent.
Unless you work with a knife for a living, it’s unlikely that you’ve ever been exposed to the world of high-end knives. A custom chef’s knife made from Damascus steel by someone like Bob Kramer can set you back $10K and yes, you need to take care of it.
A chef’s knife is like a musician’s instrument and most serious chefs spend serious money on their knives.
Sort of like musicians who drop a cool mil for a Stradivarius, even though it sounds the same as a modern high-quality violin.
No professional chef who’s not an imbecile or showoff is going to pay $10,000 for a knife. Knives are tools. You want good quality; you don’t want to spend your entire kitchen budget on marketing.
I once dated a sous-chef who worked at a restaurant with one Michelin star. I asked her what cookware they used, since obviously it must be the fanciest stuff and worth zillions. They just got pots and pans from the local restaurant supply house and used them until they wore out. They got whatever they had in stock that week. It’s exactly the same as the midrange stuff you get at Target. (I didn’t think to ask about the knives, though.)
In my experience friedo has it.
I’ve worked in a few kitchens and the knives were almost always inexpensive plastic handled knives like Dexter-Russell. The best places to work had a service that came in once a week and swapped out the old knives for newly sharpened ones, the kitchen actually owned no knives.
Pots and pans were the same. Unless you have an open kitchen a $20 skillet from a restaurant supply house works just fine and it’s not a tragedy when it gets all dented up.
I have some Global brand knives that I really like. I’ve seem them used on Iron Chef America so they are probably good.
It depends on what you do with those knives. The knives used for sushi and sashimi, for instance, are extraordinary things that cost serious money, need serious care, and do things that no other knife can do. IIRC, the Japanese ones are usually single-edged (i.e.- single-side beveled) with shallow angles for extraordinary sharpness, while the more westernized ones have asymmetrical double-edged honings as a compromise with the usual western double-edged knives. It all depends on what the knife is intended to accomplish. For many things you can manage just fine with an ax or a hacksaw! 
You can be sure that any identifiable knife (and Global are very easily identified) on a TV program is a sponsored placement.
As has been pointed out above - prior to SS, good knives were high carbon steel. These steels harden much more than SS, and take an astoundingly sharp edge. And also, as noted, are actually easier to sharpen and keep sharp. The only downside is the propensity to tarnish if left damp for even a moment. Otherwise they are easily better knives than even high price name brand SS knives.
A high carbon steel knife need not be outrageously expensive. However they are more complex to make than a SS knife, especially if you want the hardness and also want it to be reasonably resilient. A $10k knife is a vanity purchase. They probably never actually get used. (Modern Damascus steel knives are actually not Damascus steel - rather they are a layered knife that uses two different steels in alternate layers, and which get beaten to form nice patterns that are a bit reminiscent of the look of real Damascus swords). Maybe the $10k knife really does reproduce the real Damascus steel process, hence some small justification for its ridiculous price.
The traditional Japanese sushi knives are high carbon steel, and command pretty high prices - hundreds of dollars each. They are often a dual layer - a high carbon layer welded to a soft layer that provides support, but won’t fracture if miss-used. The really good knives are still hand made and a sushi chef will own his own set.
There are modern steels that are stainless and also take a good edge - sintered powder steels developed for machine tools like VG10, ZDP-189, R-2 and Cowry-X are used, and make for a very good knife with close to high carbon steel like properties but with good corrosion resistance. These steels are also laminated to provide shatter resistance, but typically with conventional (18/8) SS.
I was going to post this. Restaurant kitchens commonly use knife services for the bulk of their knife needs. The knives are always sharp and you do not have to worry about an expensive blade “disappearing”.
Sorry, bologna.
High carbon steel of various types. Stainless alloys have gotten better, especially the heat treatment which used to be harder to control for quality, but they still tend to be more difficult to sharpen properly and more prone to edge damage than a carbon steel knife. That’s a bad combination for something that you need to cut well and consistently, and that you need to be able to care for yourself easily and on the job.
High chrome alloys in particular tend to be softer, and because of that dull more quickly and are never as sharp to begin with when compared to even a halfway decent carbon steel blade. Good heat treatment to manage the crystalline structure helps a lot, but doesn’t completely cure the problem. More exotic elements like vanadium and molybdenum have been experimented with to counteract chromium’s negative effects on knives, but results vary quite a bit. The maker makes a big difference. MAC Knives are decent moly steel. I’ve seen moly blades from other manufacturers that are pretty shitty, despite the exotic admixture.
A good chef’s knife isn’t necessarily expensive. A decent one can be had for as cheap as $100. Some chefs will indeed blow thousands on a custom job. In some kitchens rules about cleanliness make them buy acceptably good-but-cheap knives and treat them as semi-disposable. Victorinox kitchen knives are quite good even though they are very inexpensive. For regular home use, you probably can’t beat the cost-performance, and I’ve heard that many professional kitchens stock them because of the synthetic handles (easy to disinfect) as well as the price.
Shuns are marketed as high carbon stainless steel. I guess it’s a hybrid?
Wiki’s list of blade materials: List of blade materials - Wikipedia
WRT traditional Japanese sushi knives, they are very much designed for purpose, and a more conventional design isn’t going to work nearly as well. Their particular trick is very fine slicing and cutting of flesh with almost no tearing. Getting this right is a significant part of the sushi chef’s art.
As noted earlier, these knives are asymmetric - and have a flat edge and a bevelled edge. The flat edge allows the knife to take very fine slices easily. The razor sharpness avoids tearing. There is no way you will ever get a SS knife to take an edge as sharp as these knives, and certainly not hold it.
The more traditional manufacturing of the knives makes the high carbon steel element the flat side, and welds it to a soft steel or iron back that is on the bevelled side. Such knives cost a few hundred dollars each, up to about five hundred. The more difficult to make solid high carbon steel knives cost about a thousand each, up to about $1.5k for large knives. A friend of mine has two of these solid knives, and they are frightening. They will take your fingers off without you feeling it if you are not careful. But they are a pain to look after, and he doesn’t use them much anymore (mostly using some cheap ceramic knives now.) They are brittle, and very easy to chip, and tarnish easily. But they are better than any other knife I have ever seen for the actual act of cutting and slicing.
Modern stainless steel can be awfully good. My pocketknife (VG-10) sharpens easily, holds an edge close to forever, and can cut through a tin can.
Yeah, but I’m guessing you don’t use your pocketknife to cut for hours on end, 7 days a week, like kitchen knives are used.
I have stainless knives, 3 of them that are used, if not daily, at least every other day or so. Not nearly the amount of time as a professional kitchen. I find they ought to be sharpened every 3-4 months.
First let me say that I love knives. For my person EDC and outdoorsy stuff I spend a lot more than the average joe. I do all the food prep at our house and I do love a good chefs knife. That said…
The claim was made that a very expensive sushi knife can do things that no other knife can do which is BS. There are any number of filet knives under $50 that can the job reasonable well. The steel might not be as good or hold an edge as long but they will do the same job.
I’m something of a blade fetishist and I own some pretty high end knives. Blade shape and geometry can certainly be optimized for any given purpose to which one might put a knife. Sushi knives are optimized for making thin slices of raw flesh. That said, blade fetishists as a group have a regrettable tendency to grossly overstate the capabilities of Japanese cutlery and it doesn’t matter whether we are talking about battlefield weapons or kitchen knives.
Sushi knives may be optimized for use in making sushi, but that doesn’t really mean they can do things no other knife can do. Even the much-praised layered construction single beveled edge are nothing unique or even particularly special. The same features can be found in very inexpensive low-end Japanese knives. The layered construction is used by Occidental cutlers as well; AG Russell sells “sandwich” blades. Such blades are made inNorway, as well, and are sold in the US as blades and as completed knives.
The babying and fussing over their Japanese darlings that some fetishists indulge in makes me laugh. You’d think the knives were made from unicorn farts and spun kitten giggles their owners act like they are so fragile. I’ve been to hammer-ins and I’ve seen what kind of outright abuse a really first class hand-forged blade (doesn’t matter what style) can and should handle with aplomb. If touching it with your bare finger or running water over it is going to damage it, it isn’t much of a knife at all, much less a first class blade.
The big difference is really the difference between high carbon steel and SS. There is no SS (ie high chromium steel) that can take as sharp an edge as a hardened carbon steel. These knives get to RC 64, which is seriously hard. That translates to literally razor sharpness. If your $50 fillet knife is also high carbon steel, you can probably get to a good approximation, but if it is SS, it isn’t just that the edge will wear off faster, but you can’t put the edge on it in the first place. The edge will simply not hold in place whilst you sharpen the blade.
The acid test is - can you get a knife that will let you make this? For which you will usually need one of these.
ETA - Overall I do agree with Scumpup - there is far too much preciousness about high end knives.