Choosing Kitchen Knives

From all the great diversity of kitchen knives, the amateur cook will really need 4—5 types only

Note: this article is not intended to be a comprehensive peer review of the kitchen tools. Our goal is to bring you brief, but extremely practical advices. All of these have been gone through personal experience and abundantly shed (literally) with own blood.

So, we begin with an overview of knives, which play an auxiliary role in cooking

First, you need a knife for peeling vegetables (carrots). Here you might be helped by a well-known vegetable knife for economical peeling.

There are two options:

longitudinal peeling knife and transverse peeling knife

Which of them to use is a purely personal preference. For more advanced cook I would recommend also peeling knife. Peeling knife conveniently peels citruses, removes core from fruit. It is also used for vegetables and fruit figured cutting. This knife requires some skills, as careless treatment flays the skin from your fingers even better than from a lemon.

Next auxiliary knife, the so-called slicer. Slicer has a long narrow blade, and designed to cut the finest slices of the product before serving. For example, smoked salmon. All you have certainly had to deal with the problem. You want to slice and serve fish beautifully and whetting the appetite, but what you produce... well, well, not exactly the way you intended. Slicer-knife will help you resolve this problem. As slicer, by the way, you can use the knife for fillets. It is used for cutting fillets from, for example, large fish (like salmon). Or conversely, by slicer you can slice fish. So, by this slicer-knife we can, as we say in Russia, “kill (or cut ;-)) both hares”.

If it is not suitable for you to use the same knife for raw and prepared products, then get both slicer and fillet knives. It is worth to have a knife for cutting frozen food. No matter what, pork or cubes of frozen spinach. The knife is similar to slicer, has a long narrow blade, but the saw-type cutting edge.

Tip: do not try to cut frozen food with conventional kitchen knife. Don’t do this. There is a risk to lose you knife-comrade forever. High-quality knives made of solid steel grades are very sensitive to this kind of trial. Doesn't that sound ironically?

It would not hurt to have also the cleaver-knife for meat and poultry. Finally, kitchen shears. Very useful thing, both for dressing turkey and rapid opening of a package of frozen peas.

All of the knives are represented in the photographs (see references below).