[Photographs: Amazon.com (chef's knife, bread knife)] Remember how I'd mentioned that my roommate's nice Wusthof knives weren't sticking around forever? Well the day finally came when they made their sad exit from my life. Clearly, this was a bit of a debacle. Being on a budget doesn't particularly allow for the kind of splurge that would be required to replace Wusthofs, but after being privy to wonderful knives, how could I ever revert to my old stock? Thankfully, Pure Komachi 2, a subsidiary of Shun, makes an impressive line of knives at knockout prices. With not a single knife topping $25, I was skeptical as to the quality of these blades, but the aficionados behind the store counter couldn't...
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"Used regularly, it's a very inexpensive way to get $10 knives to perform almost like $80 ones." Slowly but surely, I've gone from being the girl with terrifyingly unsafe knife skills to being relatively nimble with a blade. But if there's one thing that still remains squarely outside my comfort zone, it's manual sharpening. As my current roommate is the fortunate owner of some enviable Wüsthof knives, I've yet to upgrade from my not-so-desirable (and since discontinued) Ikea set. Considering that the roommate (and her Wüsthofs) won't be around forever, I decided to put a knife sharpener to the test. With some TLC, could I get my crappy set to mimic the sharp competition? I quickly mustered up my old...
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FXcuisine.com François-Xavier of FXcuisine.com travels to Sakai, Japan, and comes back with a beautiful photo essay detailing each of four steps that go into making exquisite knives. Most kitchen knives today are stamped out of large sheets of metal. They are never as sharp as those made in Sakai. Master Ebuchi has been forging knives for the past 40 years, but he still breaks one knife for each three he tries to make. This is delicate work. François-Xavier then takes us through the blade-sharpener's workshop before visiting the handle-maker and finally the engraver....
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©iStockPhoto/lbrinck The boy I was seeing last year, a cook, passed on his knives to me before I started my first gig in a restaurant kitchen. They were his set from culinary school—sturdy and unfancy in their utilitarian black case. His nonchalance gave way to unfamiliar gravity as he ceremoniously bestowed them upon me. He demonstrated how to sharpen them, first with stone and then with steel, and looked concerned when I was catching on slowly, if at all. Knives are serious business—any cook knows that. On my first day in the kitchen, the cooks asked to see my knives. “They're hand-me-downs from a friend,” I explained. But the chefs proved far more interested in showing off their own. They...
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Gourmet profiles the Warther Museum and Knife Factory, a maker of high-carbon steel kitchen knives for 106 years located in Dover, Ohio. They're one of the last companies that still grinds the knives by hand....
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The Melissa & Doug Cutting Food Box surely deserves a spot in the toy hall of fame. I've lost count of the number of "meals" my daughter Iris, 3, has prepared for me with this thing. The best feature is the sound: when the wooden knife lops off a chunk of toy carrot, cucumber, or watermelon, the Velcro gives way with a crunch much like the sound of a real knife through celery. Trouble is, Iris has had the toy for almost two years, and she's getting bored with it. What's the next step? I have just the thing....
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One of the highlights of the holiday season, at least for me, is the prevalence of big, carnal, bone-in masses of meat: whole roasted turkeys and geese, racks of lamb, standing rib roasts…..raaaaoooarrrrr! But what is the best tool for bringing these unwieldy beasts into submission, breaking them down readily into tidy bits and pieces fit for consumption at a civilized holiday table? Carving knives are nice. Their length allows for long, smooth passes through large pieces of meat, their relatively narrow blades facilitate maneuverability in between and around rib cages and breast bones, and, when paired with a carving fork, they smack of wholesome tradition—Bob Cratchit presiding over the Christmas table. Carving knives are, however, no necessity. Not only...
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