With a vast array of kinds of kitchen knives available it can be a confusing task to choose the best kitchen knives or, if you want to go high end or just get a workhorse knife, the best professional kitchen knives to meet your needs. Below is a quick guide on the most common kinds of kitchen knives and what they are used for.
We will list them in the order that we think you should build up your collection in.
1 . Chef Knife: The Chef knife, chef’s knife, cooks’ knife or Gyuto knife in Japan is a chefs most used knife in the kitchen. For home use it is a great place to start your cooking knife collection. Most chefs and home cooks will reach for this knife 90% of the time and it can be used for slicing, dicing, chopping, and cutting and chef knives are normally around 20cm or 8 inches long with a straight to curved belly.
2. Paring knife: The paring knife, also known as the petty knife, is a small knife made for detailed or small work in the
kitchen. Paring knives are normally around 13cm or 5 inches long and are usually shaped kind of like mini chef knife.
3. Boning knife: As the name suggests these knives are used mainly for boning during food preparation but they can also be handy for trimming meats such as briskets, rump, lamb and chicken. They are around 17cm, or 7 inches long and typically
are not very tall knives with a turned-up tip and a straight blade. As they are smaller and made with less metal, they are one of the more affordable kitchen knives. We love using this style of knives to trim our briskets.
4. Carving or slicing knives: A long carving knife or slicing knife is a great edition to your knife collection especially if you love to BBQ or cook of butcher large portions of meat. Long knives such as these, typically 25-30cm long, sometimes even longer let you cut through your briskets and large cuts of protein with less strokes of the blade giving you cleaner, neater cuts. These knives typically have long flat blades but some also turn up towards the knife tip.
5 .Bread Knives: This is obvious but let’s go over the bread knife anyway as they might be called bread knives, but they can be used for more than just bread. Typically, a bread knife is around 25cm long and is serrated and guess what it is great for cutting bread. Bread knives are also great on ripe tomatoes, and we have used a bread knife to slice up our brisket as the serrated edge works great on slow cooked smoked briskets.
The five kinds of kitchen knives mentioned above are what we would consider to be a great set of cooking knives to get most enthusiastic cooks and chefs heading in the right direction.