/ck/ - Food & Cooking

what kind of knives? chopping? skinning? bread? butter? paring?

the knife in your picture is pretty affordable

Fujiwara gyuto/french chef. 210mm FKM (stainless) for home cooks ($75) and 240mm FKH (high carbon) for aspiring pro chefs ($80).

There are cheaper passable knives (hey there, Victorinox), but no better value on the market.

>>4642341
>the knife in your picture is pretty affordable
Hahaha.. touche.

My budget is pretty small. I'm a college student on his summer break.
Just one knife with a lot of uses would be fine until I have enough money for a set.

>>4642347
>no better value
I'll keep those brands in mind for when I have more money.

The victorinix knives are fine, but not as cheap as they once were. Still, $30 isn't bad. I inherited a Wusthof Classic 8" chef's knife my brother used when he was a line cook 10 years ago, and it's still my favorite knife.

>>4642389

They're getting close to $40 for a decent sized chef knife. Thank you viral marketing!

>>4642356
>until I have enough money for a set
No. 80% of your budget should go to a (French) chef knife, 15% to a bread knife, and 5% to whatever cheap and cheerful paring knife you can find (no matter what it'll be thin and lightly used and so keep a decently sharp edge).

>>4642394
They've never made a great chef knife, just the cheapest chef knife that doesn't completely blow. What they do have the best value in is bread knives, with either of the offset deli knife or 10-11" serrated pastry knives as good as knives 3X the price.

>>4642356
If you're willing to be careful with it and wait for shipping, a set of ceramic knives off of dealextreme will serve you startlingly well. It at least did for me, and I was doing serious amounts of cooking as an undergrad. However, once you fuck them up they're fucked forever. One of the 'two knives and a peeler' sets should have everything you need and barely set you back at all.

Overall, ceramic knives tend to be cheaper for the same sharpness but also more fragile. Turns out decent ceramic is easier to make than decent steel, though once you do have the cash I'd start collecting some very, very good steel knives to replace them.

check out some of the dexter russell sanisafe knives

>>4642410
>a set of ceramic knives
And so the trolling begins.

>>4642410
>ceramic
oh the horror!

>>4642394

I own the 10" one, and it's not decent-sized, it's huge. Get the 8" one even if the 10" seems like a better deal.

Still, the Wusthof holds an edge better, needs less steeling, has better balance, and has that nice little sweep forward at the back of the blade so you can pinch it easier.

>>4642402
>bread knife

I never understood this. If you keep your chef's knife properly sharp, it'll cut through bread like butter, with far less tearing than an actual bread knife. Compare with cheese, which is annoying as fuck to cut with a chef's knife no matter how sharp it is, cheese knives exist, and nobody owns one (not even me).

>>4642427
many people don't want to screw with their blades on a hard crusted bread, and bread isn't really one of those things that a serrated knife will fuck up

>>4642427
>it'll cut through bread like butter
They can do it if you're obsessive, but if you're cutting crusty loaves and have a hard steel knife it leads to microchips and 10X the maintenance to keep it performing, and you have to have impeccable technique even then to not completely kill your knife. It's like cutting leather or frozen shit--yes, if I use obsessively good technique I can get away with it using my Masamoto KS, but it's just not worth it when I can grab a beater and save the wear/worry. Horses for courses and all that shit.

>>4642433
>many people don't want to screw with their blades
He did say he has a Whusthof, aka a knife whose only legitimate selling point is you can screw with it without completely ruining it (even if in its non-ruined state it's a meh at best performer).

>>4642446
I use wusthofs as well
wouldn't want to slice crusty bread with it if I had a bread knife around. It dulls them very fast
wouldn't want to use any of my hard blades on it, either, but would use the wusthof before the hard blades

>>4642446
also, they have wonderful fit and finish, and some people prefer the feel and profile, are very stainless (only time I've ever seen one pit was when a dumbass left one in a bain marie for hours)
all decent selling points, depending on the person

>>4642454
>but would use the wusthof before the hard blades
Absolutely. They'd bend before chipping and so could probably be fixed on a honing rod if you were just doing/abusing it occasionally. I use a Henckel when I need to kill stuff, and German battle axes certainly have their place when you need to beat the shit out of things.

As for the profile, rock chopping is for people who don't know what they're doing, and that's the only motion their profile really promotes. I know that sounds like some snobby French bullshit, but if I'm rock chopping at the end of a ten hour shift I have to concentrate or risk losing a finger. The slicing movement encouraged by a classic Sabatier/gyuto pattern, in my experience at least, is all of safer, more efficient, and more precise. I've never met anyone who's spent a week with a good French pattern and not been won over for 90% of their kitchen tasks.

>>4642485
good for you, but it's not that it sounds like snobby French bullshit because you have a preferred way of doing the job. It sounds like snobby bullshit because you claim others who don't do it the exact same way as you don't know what they're doing.

>>4642512
>don't know what they're doing
Except that they really don't know what they're doing. Or they're in a branch of cooking that would never dream of using a Wusthof. It's not arbitrary; there's a reason every culinary school worth two shakes of the dick teaches you to cut with a pistoning, slicing motion.

go buy some cutco

>>4642529
except that's bullshit and also easier to do with a german profile for many people, and you wouldn't know the difference
I'm sure you're going to make claims that you are such an amazing xray vision knife weilder that YOU can tell a difference, but you're full of shit for it, and deep down, you know it
attitudes like yours are all the more reason to NOT use a french profile knife
fortunately I don't let shit attitudes bother me, so I'll continue to enjoy all the french, japanese, german, and fusion profiled knives that I have

>>4642546
>also easier to do with a german profile
>huehuehue
Fair enough. Basic physics and geometry can go fuck themselves. Not to mention centuries of culinary tradition. If Susie Homemaker likes her stainless German battleaxe, who am I to stand in the way.

>>4642546
>fusion
bad troll

>>4642573
and what would you call most earlier, and still many gyuto profiles? Yes, I realise the current trend is to copy the nogent profile, not all are doing that

Thanks for the suggestions, guys. I'm going to look through the brands and try to find a chef's knife within my budget.

Here's the end result of those beets. It tasted... interesting.
I don't know if I'd make it again, but I'm glad I tried it.
I'm still on the fence over blue cheese. I like the taste.. but I couldn't eat a lot of it.

>>4642603
>nogent
>current trend
Most production gyuto follow a French profile fairly closely, and have for 150 years. Dutch traders and French chefs were the only people those xenophobic fuckers would let into the country back in the 1800s, and those French chefs brought their French chef knives with them. The gyuto IS a French chef minus the bolster and with thinner steel, and this isn't some hip trend bullshit, with gyuto literally meaning "cow sword" and those old Sabs the French brought over 150 years ago quite literally being miniature (and symmetrical, in contrast to the German's asymetrical profile) swords with an offset handle put on meant for cutting up cow (and other) meat.

It's only the custom stuff that five people on the planet own that start bringing "hybrid" gyuto-santoku bullshit to the table, which is additionally bizarre given the santoku is a century old gyuto/nakiri hybrid meant to appeal to a growing but still xenophobic as fuck Japanese middle class who needed a multi-purpose knife but wouldn't buy the French chef/gyuto because it was too foreign.

The history's really quite interesting if you aren't primarily concerned with spitting out poorly informed bullshit.

>>4642649
as you will notice, some of these have the deeper bellies and curved lines characteristic of german knives
others have an very close copy to the nogent
yet many others have a french curve and slimmer belly, while the tip curves down more abruptly at the top

>>4642649

>>4642649
oh, and let's not forget the honyaki influenced shape present in some (notably the first pic)

>>4642649
and a couple of those have lines that are a combination of all influences

>>4642649
Sounds correct enough, but could do with a little less of a rabid convinction of the xenophobia of people you've never met.

What did they call that again? Irony?

>>4643000
The only knife shown clearly and fully in this image is a santoku, not a honyaki-influenced gyuto.

>>4643001
The top is a German profile, yes. Shun also makes a German profile knife. That doesn't make either typical of the classic gyuto, which was explicitly patterned after the Sabatier before anybody alive today was born. Atypical outliers aside, slight variations between gyutos are no different than you'd find between an F. Dick and a Wusthof and a Henckel. Those are all still Germans first (though with the Henckel moving towards being something of a hybrid pattern).

The middle knife adds bulk to the top half of the knife to increase durability while using thinner steel, which is something found in many gyuto but does nothing to change the profile of the blade edge, the centered tip, or the knife's utility as a slicing and paring tool.

The third (which may be a KS--the lower one in >>4643004 certainly is), represents the most loyal Sabatier clone.

Really, I don't know what you're getting at. You've grabbed images of a santoku and a bunch of other knives that are either Sabatier clones or that use a Sabatier edge profile and centered tip while bulking up the spine to compensate for thinner steel used. And this proves what exactly?

>>4643019
I may have overcompensated on the "this isn't a weeaboo thing" angle. But the inability to take the French chef to the Japanese market was, historically, wholly down to its foreign nature and that in turn is what led to the creation of the santoku, which doesn't do vegies as well as a nakiri or multi-task as well as a French chef/gyuto.

>>4643046
oh, so we're changing from earlier to classic, and from overall profile to only the profile of the blade edge now? Not all tasks are limited to slicing and paring. So what we have is differing definitions as the points are elaborated upon. No, that's not how a logical conversation works. The first image wasn't chosen to show the santoku, and latching on to it being the predominant knife in the picture makes absolutely no point whatsoever, other than just to show that you're trying to argue in any way that you can.
So let's get this straight here. German profiled gyutos exist, yet they will have thinner blades, and are typically not as accentuated in curvature as the traditional german profiles. There are many shapes close to the traditional french profile, with varied tip curvatures and bellies (some with very little blade curvature at all), and yet, all of these are supposed to be considered wholly french profile, and could, in no way, be referred to as a fusion in characteristic styles? right, ok. bs

>>4642336
>plastic butter knife
Go to any thriftstore RIGHT NOW and buy some cheap 2nd hand knives, and a cheap sharpening device of some kind.
Worry about getting a real knife later.

>>4643077
>The first image wasn't chosen to show the santoku
The first image was chosen because you don't have a clue and are pulling shit out of your ass as you go along. Otherwise you wouldn't have placed a santoku front and center when trying to make a point about gyutos.

Changing the profile of the spine slightly while maintaining a centered tip in no way changes the way you would use the knife compared to the full Sabatier profile and you're falling back on semantics vis a vis pulling shit out of your ass as you go along.

>typically not as accentuated in curvature
Shun is a Wusthof clone, aka accentuated as fuck and with the tip 90% of the way up, and an outlier. The knife you pictured is a Henckel clone. 5% of the market being made up by outliers doesn't change what 95% of the market is. The gyuto originated as a Sab clone. Today, of the 1000s of different gyutos on the market, an exceedingly small minority fall so far from that that they bear almost no relation to a Sabatier in basic shape or functionality. This doesn't change what a gyuto is, short bus. Stick to things you know fuck all about.

>>4643106
See, now your claiming that I put a santoku front and center, which I did not. Yes, it happens to be the first image posted, but if you look at the times, the images were posted in direct succession. And the knife referred to in the picture in the latter post (a product of dumping a few images) was obviously not the santoku. And how about the devin? Is that full curvature? No. So you can claim you know so much more about it, and think you know what you're talking about and get all high and mighty and tell others they know fuck all when all you are doing is getting so caught up in trying to make points out of things that weren't ever said or brought up. That doesn't make what the other person said wrong, only what you are claiming that they said. So go back and reread the fucking conversation sometime when you can think clearly and might actually want to have a real conversation instead of just being a shithead trying to force a conversation in directions it never went. Autist as fuck

Kiwi. Sharp and cheap as fuck. But you should probably consider investing in a steel if you buy them.

>>4643123
>Autist as fuck
Game. Set. Match. You're a lost cause, but hopefully a few will have learned a little more about knives thanks to your aggressive idiocy.

>>4643123
>your claiming that I put a santoku front and center, which I did not
>Yes, it happens to be the first image posted

>>4643140
>lost cause
right back at you, buddy
I'm not the one who started the insulting language and claiming things were said that never were
maybe one of these days you'll learn a couple people skills, and maybe, just maybe, realize that it's not about
>Game. Set. Match
You can try to claim a win if you want, but a game where you make up the rules as you go is no game at all, and hey, if that's what makes you feel like a winner in life, have at it. Hopefully you'll learn something too sometime.

>>4643151
>taking a point showing understanding of how one might come to an errant conclusion out of context of a statement showing how the conclusion is errant