How to choose the perfect knife

When it comes to tools of the kitchen, most professional chefs will say that a good knife is essential to having success in your cooking. We’ve put together some simple tips for choosing a good knife and keeping it in the best condition possible.

Choosing a knife

If you do decide to invest in a new knife it can be quite overwhelming with the amount of choice on the market.

The first knife any home cook should own is a "chef’s knife". This kitchen staple was originally designed to slice and joint big portions of beef so will be well equipped to deal with your field and flower order!

Most chefs knives will have a blade of about 8 inches but depending on the size of your hands or what you tend to be chopping you may want to have a look for another length. (As a pretty petite chef, I swear by the 6 inch variety but you can find anything up to 14 inches).

You will also want to look at style which tend to fall into three categories; French, German and Japanese. The French and German styles are quite similar with the German being more deeply curved along the whole blade and the French style having a more straight edge which only curves towards the tip. Japanese knives (and particularly the Santoku style) have a slightly different shape, including what is known as a ‘sheep’s foot tip’, and they also tend to be a fair bit lighter than the more robust Wuropean styles. Whichever style you feel more comfortable with should be the one you go for as there isn’t a clear winner between the west versus east knife battle.

Sharpening

Whether you’ve splashed out on a fancy knife or just like to use one bought from the supermarket or a department store, the most important thing is that your knife is sharp. As contrary as it may sound, a sharp knife is much safer than a blunt one – mainly because you have to use much less pressure to slice anything and therefore you have less chance of slipping.

If you’ve had your knife for a while and you know it is far from sharp then we’d suggest looking into getting it professionally sharpened. If you’re London based, a good company to go to is the Japanese Knife Company as you can get your knife sharpened at one of their shops for around £6 (price varies according to size of knife). A visit to one of their shops anyway is a delight for a keen cook as the knives they stock are simply stunning and they do a good range of other kitchen tools and barware as well.

Another good option for sharpening is to invest in an electric sharpener which is an incredibly easy option as a beginner. Electric sharpeners are very efficient as they will often provide two or three ‘grinding wheels’ with different levels of coarseness. It’s always important to start on the roughest stone and work towards the finest.

When using an electric sharpener, make sure you only use a light pressure when pulling the knife through the slot, and always start at the heel of the knife and pull slowly to the tip. It’s important not to rush this as you could end up having uneven sharpening or taking off way too much material and having your knife lasting nowhere near as long as it should.

Unless you a prepared to look into using a whetstone in great detail, whether that be copious YouTube videos or a knife sharpening course, we would advise beginners to look for alternatives. There is no doubt that a whetstone or a diamond stone is a very good tool for sharpening a knife, it just very heavily relies on the judgment of angles by eye and knowledge of how much pressure to apply.

Using a Honing Steel/Rod

A honing steel or rod is often referred to as a sharpening steel which can be a bit misleading as you can’t actually sharpen a knife on it. The steel/rod is just used to keep your knife in the best shape between sharpening. There are a few different methods of using a steel; the first being to hold the steel with it’s tip on the work surface and pull your knife downwards, the second would be to hold the steel parallel to the floor and work horizontally – this is something that definitely requires a bit of practice and research. Chefs Jamie Oliver and Gordon Ramsay both have great youtube videos on the subject! Whichever method you prefer, you should make sure to keep your pressure light and that whatever you do to one side of the blade, you do to the other to ensure the knife stays nice and even and not bending over to one side.

Holding a knife

Just like choosing the knife, the way you hold it is something that is also very personal but most chefs will swear by the ‘pinch grip’. This is essentially placing your thumb on the base of the blade and index finger on the other side (pinching it between the two – you can see they were very creative with the naming process!) and wrapping the remaining fingers around the actual handle section. If you’re not used to this it may feel really bizarre at first but as long as you keep your hand quite relaxed, you will find you have much more accuracy in cutting than just having all fingers wrapped around the handle.

Using a good quality knife and getting the skills down are some of the best ways to make your meal prep take much less time but it will take practice. Our best advice? Have a go at making a stir-fry with loads of different veggies that you can practice slicing and dicing and then throw in some of our Lemon, Ginger and Chilli Chicken Breast Strips and some cooked noodles and you’ll be well on your way to great knife skills (and have a super tasty meal to boot).