Knives - what do you think essential and why?

[Kermit power]

I've seen loads of kitchen knives, and have a fair few myself, but other than a flexible filleting knife I use when I'm butchering deer carcasses I find that I rarely use anything other than a 6" Zelite chef's knife that cost me all of about £30 on Amazon about 5 years ago.

It feels perfectly comfortable for anything from finely slicing cherry tomatoes or dicing shallots upwards, but I'm wondering if I'm missing out on anything?

And yes, whilst I have got a commission cheque doing its best to burn a bit of a hole in my pocket, if a £30 knife can do pretty much all I need for several years, I'm struggling to see what some of the knives I've seen for 10x that price or more truly offer that's worth the extra?

[Kermit power]

craigjm said:

I have:

8 inch chefs knife
8 inch carving knife
8 inch bread knife
7.5 inch nakiri knife
7 inch santoku knife
3.5 inch paring knife

Do you actually use them all?

I've ordered one of these to try alongside my chef's knife because I've seen so many people saying how good they are for onions - the thing I prep more often than anything else! - but I just never use my paring knives at all, for example.

[Kermit power]

carinatauk said:

I use the following:

Cleaver
Paring
Nakiri
Semi flexible filleting

In fairness the cleaver will do everything, the paring knife for the fiddly bits, Nakiri for everything but stuff with bones [chips to easily]. Like you I dissect deer carcasses with a fillet knife and butchers saw

I really must get myself one of those, since at the moment I just use a standard hacksaw which isn't great.... More importantly, I have one of these in the garage...



...and with every new carcass I do, it gets just a little harder to persuade myself that cleaning it out before and after would actually be more effort than using the hacksaw!

[Kermit power]

Pit Pony said:

Whatever knife you chose. Just keep it sharp.

It's safer that way.

I used to think this, but following the infamous Thomas the Tank Engine dinner set debacle of 2019 I can use all seven of my toddler's fingers to count the number of knives in our house we've decided not to keep sharp in future.