this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
833 points (98.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43159 readers
1909 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy π
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A good chef knife
Also makes and excellent chrismas/birthday present
What makes a good chef knife good? What to look for and to avoid?
To be fair a 30$ knife is enough... Definitely don't buy those fancy japanese knifes for 200$ or so.
America's Test Kitchen did some extensive testing and found that the Victorinox Swiss Army Fibrox Pro 8" Chefβs Knife performed well above its cost. It costs around $50 (current $43 on Amazon), but they found it performed at or above the level of the fancier knives on the market. Their guess is that Victorinox had perfected a technique to make their microscopic grain of steel smaller, leading to a sharper knife and better longevity.
It really depends because different knives are made of different grades of different materials, with different weights and so on. You want one that sits nicely in your hand, with a nice weight, that you can use without cutting the hand holding it. I'm a chef myself so I have a small collection of fairly expensive knives that are durable and stay sharper for longer, but I could be cutting food continuously for a good few hours in a day four or five days a week, so for home use you just want a midrange knife that suits you ergonomically and needs as much maintenance as you can be arsed dedicating to it. I'd say a honing steel and middle-fine whetstone might even be the better purchase, and to stop keeping your knives in a drawer and so on.
If you don't know, find the closest restaurant supply or head to amazon and just buy the Victorinox standard that is in basically every commercial kitchen everywhere. It's probably about $20-30 and will hold up nicely. Outside of that, I found a well reviewed amazon thing for around $35-40 probably about 5 years ago, and it's been great.
I'm going to add a little and say that almost every kitchen should have a honing steel and a basic set of sharpening stones. No knife is going to stay sharp forever.
If I had kitchen that didn't have these things, that is how I'd spend my $100.