Saucy
May 10, 2005

Practically Cooking: Look Sharp

Next to cookware, the most important thing in your kitchen is your cutlery. So, as with your brand new cookware, your knives are something you shouldn't skimp on. There are two ways to build up your knife collection: buying sets or buying individual pieces. Since a superb chef's knife costs as much or more than some entire sets, either way can end up costing you a fair amount of money.

The knives that you will find most useful are a chef's knife, a boning knife, a paring knife, and a serrated knife for cutting bread, tomatoes and other foods with tough outsides and soft insides. But while boning and paring knives are better suited for their namesake tasks, a sharp, carefully-wielded chef's knife can do most anything reasonably well. If you decide to start out with just one knife in your kitchen and build from there, a chef's knife should be your first.

For beginning cooks, knife sets are a pretty good bargain. You'll get all of the most important knives in one fell swoop, they often come with steak knives or utility shears, and many of them come in an attractive block that might sell for $25 or more on its own. But cutlery sets often come with one or two knives that you'll barely use, and the knives in cheaper sets are almost invariably of mediocre quality.

When considering the seemingly amazing values of $80-and-less cutlery sets, you should bear in mind that Farberware's Classic Series knives and many other inexpensive knives that claim to "never need sharpening" live up to their claims only because they are serrated (or "microserrated"). While the slightly jagged edge keeps them "sharp" for the few years you'll use them until they start to corrode, none of them are very sharp, even brand new. See, serrated knives actually rip or saw your food apart, not cut it, as fine-edged knives do. Sometimes this distinction isn't terribly important, but a serrated chef's knife is, at best, only serviceable. When it comes to chopping scallions or cutting raw meats, you'll quickly find that fine-edge blades are much easier, quicker and more pleasant to work with, as well as more durable. I own a Farberware Classic Series Set myself, and it serves me well enough. But as I've become slightly better at cooking over the last few years and started to experiment with more complicated dishes, I began to feel that it was time to replace my Farberware set's less-than-ideal centerpiece with a proper, fine-edged chef's knife that would last me the rest of my life.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to kitchen knives: the German way and the Japanese way. German knives such as those by Wüsthof or Henckels have a beveled, 22-1/2° edge. This results in a thick, relatively heavy, and durable knife. Most knives available in the US are German-style knives. Japanese knives such as Global or Mac knives are traditionally made from harder steel alloys, enabling a smoother, 15° edge, resulting in a thinner blade. A good Japanese knife is sharper, lighter, and won't need to be sharpened as often as German-style knives.

Whichever style chef's knife you choose, you'll want one with a full tang -- that is to say, with the handle riveted to the blade or where the handle and the blade are one solid piece. And unless your budget is very tight, you'll want a forged knife; forged knives are, in general, more durable than stamped knives, but they're also more expensive. As with your cookware, you'll want to see how any knife feels in your hands before you buy it. If your hand isn't comfortable, you can't use it safely. If you're at a decent department store or a dedicated kitchen store such as Sur la Table, they'll generally have a cutting board out and be happy to take down a knife from the glass case for you to make a few pretend cuts with.

After handling a few different knives, I found that I preferred Japanese style knives, and I narrowed down my choices to a Mac Superior 8-1/2" Chef's Knife ($110, J. Toguri Mercantile Co., (773) 929-3500) and Global's 8-1/4" Heavyweight Chef's Knife ($118) from Sur la Table). I loved the extra heft of the Global, but the Mac seemed to be the sharper of the two and I preferred the Mac's riveted, wooden handle to the solid metal Global knife. Metal handles just don't feel as safe as wooden handles to me, especially considering that my hands are wet half the time I'm cooking.

Actually using my new Mac knife at home for the first time was a dream. Meat just slid apart wherever I touched it with my blade. The thinnest slices of onion fell away onto the cutting board. And then I accidentally cut off a bit of my finger while cleaning it.

Whether or not you spring for a big, expensive Charlie Trotter-endorsed knife or get a cheap set to use until you figure out how diligent you're going to be at this cooking thing, once you've selected your weapon of choice, you need to use and care for your knives properly so that they last, so that they stay sharp, and so that you don't injure yourself. You can't make thin slices with dull knives, and -- more importantly -- dull knives slip. Knives that slip have the undesirable habit of cutting you.

You should always hold a knife at the top, holding the blade between your forefinger and your thumb just above of the handle. If you hold your knives properly while cutting with them, cleaning them is actually the more dangerous of the two tasks. It's best for both your knives and your fingers to always clean them by hand immediately after using them. For your fingers' sake, always clean them using a dishcloth or sponge in an outward motion, not back and forth, from behind the cutting edge of the blade. For your knives' sake, never wash them in a dish washer. And for God's sake, never leave them soaking in murky dishwater.

To best prevent your knife from slipping, you need to have a proper cutting surface and a sharp blade. Your cutting board should either be made of plastic or a soft wood such as bamboo or maple. There is some debate on which is better, wood or plastic, but in any case I recommend getting both. I use a plastic Farberware cutting board for raw meats and a wooden cutting board made by the Illinois-based John Boos & Co. for everything else. Of course, in caring for your knife properly, you also need to care for your cutting board properly, by treating it with mineral oil periodically, never soaking it in water, and, even though wood has natural bacteria-killing properties, always cleaning it immediately after each use.

To keep the fine edge of your blade sharp, get a sharpener or a whetstone and use it every few hours of use for German knives, or much less frequently for Japanese knives. In addition to being sharpened, German style knives should also be honed, or straightened, using a steel before each use. Since Japanese knives are made of harder steel, you shouldn't need to hone them as often as with German knives, or at all. Mac actually instructs you not to hone its knives (in fact, doing so voids the warranty) and simply recommends the Fiskars RollSharp sharpener ($17.95, J. Toguri Mercantile Co.). Global's Ceramic Water Sharpener ($29.95) is a comparable sharpener for their own knives.

Thanks to Nathan and the staff at J. Toguri Mercantile and the Lincoln Park Center Sur La Table