[00:00] A good chef's knife needs to do three things, needs to cut through all sorts of ingredients with ease, have a good, comfortable handle, and stay sharp.
[00:14] And it's even better if they don't cost an arm and a leg, which some of them can. You can spend a ton of money on a good chef's knife, Julie. You know that. We have recommended Old Faithful, which is the Victorinox Swiss Army chef's knife for decades
[00:28] now. This is a fabulous knife, but there are always new knives on the market. So we retest it frequently, which is what we're doing here. We have this lineup of 10 chef's knives.
[00:40] We set a price cap of $75, because as you mentioned, we don't want to spend too much money. All the blades are about eight inches long, which is a super useful length for us. They're all stainless steel or stain resistant. At the very beginning and then again at the end of the testing, we used an industrial sharpness
[00:56] testing machine to test the sharpness. We also had a squad of testers who had varying hand strengths and dominance. They sliced tomatoes, they diced onions, they minced parsley and garlic.
[01:09] They broke down whole chickens, and they prepped and diced hard butternut squash. That's tough one. There are a couple of factors that go into sharpness. Very important is the blade geometry. And that is the blade at the very bottom gets ground down to the cutting edge.
[01:26] If you have a narrow blade geometry, something like 12 or 13 degrees, that can help a knife feel super sharp. The range for our knives here was 13 to 16 degrees.
[01:38] And testers were surprised that some of the knives at the wider end of that range felt super sharp. I want you to try your copy of old faithful there while I talk about sharpness.
[01:50] Slice it tomato, see what you think. I know this knife very well. It's almost like those knives are connected to our hands. I know. There's no muscle involved. And usually you can do some pretty fine work if you want to.
[02:04] Yep. Very nice. Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that made this knife as sharp as it is was not in fact the blade geometry because it was at the wider end of the spectrum. It was how the blade was sharpened and honed at the factory, which was news to us.
[02:19] It has to be really well sharpened, really well honed when testers took a super close look at the cutting edge. It was very smooth, very even. Give this one a try just as a kind of comparison. Well, they look like the same thickness from above.
[02:31] Yeah. They kind of do. All right. Let's see. Oh no. I have to use, I mean, I'm still able to cut the tomato just fine. But I'm really having to put a lot more hand power behind it. And if I had a lot of cutting to do, that would eventually make my hand a little tired.
[02:46] I mean, you're definitely getting through the tomato, but it's really more about the journey than the destination because as you say, this one probably just doesn't feel as sharp. Yeah. And actually, I have to really push, if I want to get a thin slice, I have to really
[02:58] push down on the tomatoes, which squeezes out all the juice. Yeah. Now that doesn't have to do with the curry angle, it has to do with how it was sharpened and honed at the factory. Interesting. So there are a couple of other factors that testers look for in a knife.
[03:11] One is all of these knives have a little bit of curvature to the blade. Now, so you can rock them and mince through parsley or garlic or something like that. Right. It's a gentler curve like the one in your hand to something like this, which is more
[03:25] dramatic. You can see how sharply that curves up towards the end. It looks cool. Yeah. I mean, it looks great, but they felt that it felt awkward. It's like a rocking horse. Yeah. It's like a rock horse. I like having a firm edge.
[03:37] So another factor to look for is height of the blade, especially towards the heel by the handle. Again, old faithful, wrap your hand around the handle. Plenty of space for your knuckles.
[03:49] Try this one. Oh, this is my biggest pet peeve. Yeah. My knuckles can hit the bore before the knife blade. So testers were looking for a two inch height at the heel. The last thing is how thick the blade is and how it tapers from the heel towards the tip.
[04:06] Thicker blades felt a little clumsier. They preferred thinner blades. They preferred thicker at the heel, so if you're cutting through a chicken bone or something tough, you can get through it with a little more authority, but a taper towards the tips.
[04:19] They also liked a spine that was a little rounded so that if you're choking up on the knife and you're gripping it really hard, you're not gripping into a sharp edge on the spine of the knife. Yep. The handle, obviously very important.
[04:32] You know, a softer material, a little more rubbery, a little more grippy, no weird swoops or shapes in the handle was preferred. Yeah, because this stays firm in your hand, even if your hands get a little slick.
[04:44] This one stands out to me because it's rounded, which looks cool, but no, it's a spinner. You would spin around in your hand if your hands were a little wet or slippery. Yeah. It's a hard material. It's comfortable as long as your hands aren't slippery and then it gets a little dangerous
[04:56] and a little dicey. Julia, try and contain your shot here at this old faithful one again. Not surprised. This is the knife. This is the Victorinox Swiss Army fibrox pro-Aiden chef's knife.
[05:09] It's terrific. It's got a well proportioned blade that stays nice and sharp. The handle is comfortable for all kinds of users. You still recommend that knife highly. It's $38, so it's a bargain.
[05:21] I will say it's on the light side. It weighs around six ounces. Some testers preferred a slightly heavier knife and there was a heavier knife that kept up with the old faithful. This is the Mercer Culinary Renaissance 8-inch Ford chef knife.
[05:35] It weighs about eight ounces, so here, try that. May I? Yeah. Oh, we did, yeah. It was nice and sharp, but it gives you a little more heft and the price was right on this one, too. It's just $31.
[05:47] Pleasure. So there you have it. If you're in the market for a new chef's knife and want to spend less than $75, there are two to check out. The first is the Victorinox Swiss Army fibrox pro-Aiden chef's knife at about $38 and the other
[06:01] one, which is a little bit heavier, is the Mercer Culinary Renaissance 8-inch Ford's chef's knife at about $31. At Cook's Illustrated, we're food nerds. That's why every recipe we develop involves research, cooking science, and rigorous testing
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