Knives are essential kitchen tools and are critical because it affects the quality of cooking. To prepare the best dishes, you must cut the food items into pieces of the proper size that suits the recipe and makes it easy to consume. Whether you are a chef or a homemaker, to achieve kitchen efficiency and support your cooking ambitions, you need the right cutting tools or knives of the right size and type of blade that allow precision cutting with superior skills. Skills in using knives are equally crucial as knife selection because we all know that only a bad workman quarrels with his tools.
A variety of kitchen knives are available, and whether you should have all of them or only a selected few depends on the extent of cooking you do. It is a factor to consider for the use of knives in home kitchens, whereas for commercial kitchens, having as many different types of knives is a good option. If you occasionally cook at home, then having a chef knife and paring knife should serve your purpose. However, if you are a cooking enthusiast, you must replicate the inventory of knives found in any commercial kitchen.
What kind of kitchen knife would suit you best depends on your field and level of cooking and the type of performance you expect from the tools.
This article should help you select knives by focusing on the type of tasks you want to accomplish by using the tool.
Chef knife
The most versatile and common type of knife that you will find in any kitchen, whether at home or restaurants, the Chef knife is mainly for carnivores as it is ideal for cutting meat. You can choose a size between 6-14 inches for accomplishing other tasks like disjointing some cuts, dicing vegetables, chopping nuts, and slicing herbs. Despite the versatility of the chef knife, it is not suitable for carving dense meat, cleaving meat bones, slicing breads. Disjointing some cuts and doing smaller precision tasks like mincing and peeling.
Utility knives
Utility knives have a similar design like Paring knives, but their size is somewhere between the Chef Knife and Paring knife ranging from 4 inches to 7 inches. Utility knives might have a plan or serrated edges, and many people call them sandwich knives. Ideally, you should use these knives for slicing meat, buns, and bagels, chopping vegetables, cutting sandwiches, slicing herbs, and doing other general kitchen tasks that other knives fail to do.
Utility knives cannot help with precision tasks like mincing and peeling as it is even not suitable for slicing bread loaves and cleaving meat bones.
Cleaver
Also known as the butcher’s knife, the Cleaver has a much heavier and thicker blade than all other kitchen knives and exclusively suits commercial settings where a large cutting volume of meat is involved. The Cleaver is ideal for splitting any meat from the bone and suitable for cutting larger vegetables and fruits like pumpkin, watermelon, etc.
Although smaller cleavers are useful for dicing fruits and vegetables, their primary use is for cutting meat.
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