Knives - what do you think essential and why?

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?

I'm no chef, and I haven't butchered a deer in, oh, my life. I use a 20cm Wusthoff cook's knife for almost everything. It was a leaving present from a retail job in about 1998 so it's a similar scenario to yours. I have a cheap, slim chinese cleaver type thing I use for carving. My mum brought that back from Peking in 1976 and it's a different shape these days from sharpening but it's a great carving knife. Anything fiddly I've got a wood handled small one that's shaped like a traditional carving knife that I think either came back from a trip to Barcelona in 1992 - purchased for cutting stuff in our picnic lunches, or it's another that was in my mum's kitchen drawers when we cleared them. It's past its best now, so I'll need to source a replacement soon, I guess.

I have a Hiromoto High Carbon Gyuto 270mm that I use for everything
and an Opinel breadknife

I use:

Bread Knife
Carving Knife
Chefs Knife
Boning Knife

Don't like small fiddly knives.

I use the paring knife most of all and then the chefs, carving and bread knife. The two Japanese style knives get used less often depending on what I am making.

I agree with mobile chicane you don’t need a set and keep them sharp. Mine are all Japanese so 16 degrees on the sharpener

If you’re an Asian auntie/uncle, there is only one knife required;



Irrespective, of butchering a cow or prepping spring rolls.

Get a set of plastic-handle Victorinox knives as a good way to keep them sharp. I've seen them used in multi-Michelin starred restaurants and they are a solid choice. Often, people will then add one "exceptional" knife - this is where you can blow the budget, but the heavy lifting is done with the plastic ones

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!

yes but do you use them?

i have a 9in , 7in and 5in santoku profiled knives, a 9in filleting knife, a 3.5in paring, a bread knife and a cleaver. mostly damascus blades, and i have the matching carving set and sharpener [oooOOOOooo]

i would say the 7in santoku does 90% of the work [i'm also a slider]. the paring now and again, and then the bread knife for toast. rare to use the others. they look nice i guess.

i was thinking whether to reduce the number as i saw a droolworthy 3 knife combo the other day. pretty and frivolous as mine are thoroughly decent, but then looked at the individual prices and reckon i would be best suited to a pair of schmancy 7in santoku's and an ikea bread knife.

I decided to buy just one 'knife for life' last year and went for this:

https://cuttingedgeknives.co.uk/collections/sakai-...

It does everything I want and is beautifuly made. A couple of drags of a ceramic steel every once in a while keeps the blade super sharp - never had to use a wet stone on it yet.

It's a really nice thing to own