The best kitchen knives and chef's knives for 2023, tried and tested

Finding the best kitchen knife is no simple matter. Chefs’ knives are used in different ways for dicing veg, slicing salad, carving meat and cleaving joints and come in different thicknesses, types of steel, lengths and styles. Should you go for a Japanese or German-style knife? Carbon steel or stainless steel? It’s a lot to take in.

Let’s start with the question of what your knife should be made of. “Some people will tell you carbon steel has the edge for hardness and durability – and back in the 70s and 80s, when stainless steel was generally industrial and some was quite bad, that might have been true,” says Laurie Timpson, a knifemaker at Savernake Knives. “But it’s not corrosion resistant. Good stainless steel today is definitely preferable.”

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Knife-making is a trade off between hardness and brittleness. “If you try to sharpen a banana it won’t develop a very sharp edge, because it’s a soft material. At the other end of the scale, if you sharpen glass it will get very sharp indeed, but it’s very brittle,” says Timpson.

Decent chef’s knives can broadly be separated into two categories: Japanese and German (also known as Western-style, including brands such as Wüsthof and Henckels). Japanese-style knives tend to have a straighter blade and be made from harder (and so slightly more brittle) steel. German knives are heavier, tougher and have a rounded blade.

“In the broadest terms, European chefs tend to rock the blade, which is why the knives have a pronounced curve, whereas Japanese chefs tend to slice more, so their blades are straighter,” says Timpson. “It’s a different cuisine and a different method.” We’ve reviewed both German and Japanese knives below, but if you’re in a hurry here’s a quick look at our top five:

Which is the best kitchen knife in 2023? At a glance:

• Best overall – ProCook Professional X50 Micarta chef’s knife
• Best value – Victorinox Fibrox chef’s knife
• Best chef’s knife – Wüsthof classic cook’s knife
• Best universal kitchen knife – Zwilling Pro 20cm chef’s knife
• Best steel chef’s knife – Global G-2 cook’s knife

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You will also need a knife sharpener to keep your knives in good condition. (See below for our favourite one.)

What should you look for in a kitchen knife?

“If anyone asks me what you should look for in a knife I’d say it’s the hardness, which should be as close to 60 as possible on the Rockwell hardness scale,” he continues. “But there’s a huge difference between the numbers, so if the knifemaker says their knives range between 55 and 58 Rockwell, that’s sort of like me telling a policeman I was driving somewhere between 10 and 80 miles an hour. 60 is really the top end. You might find some Japanese knives at 64, but that is just ridiculous.”

That brings us nicely to the question: exactly why is everyone so obsessed with Japanese knives? “It began when Global came on the scene in the 90s. Traditional Western knives weren’t much to look at, and they were pretty heavy. So the Japanese came along with a different aesthetic. They were lighter, that was the key thing, and significantly harder,” says Timpson. “For chefs, it was a quantum leap. Since then, other makers have caught up, though.”

How we tested the best kitchen knives

Source: https://gardencourte.com
Categories: Kitchens