Full Transcript
[00:00] Hey, what's up? These three knives will meet every single cutting demands that you have in the kitchen, and collectively, they only cost about $75. Today, I'm going to explain to you why I think expensive knives aren't really worth it, and I'm going to show you my favorite knives of all time.
[00:13] When I was the online cook in Chicago just starting out, there was a really strong culture of, let's call it, dudeness. It manifested itself in many ways. It was a very competitive environment, but one of the main ways that dudeness came out was through the rarity and price of the knives in your knife kit.
[00:29] the more expensive and handmade the better and obviously I wanted to fit in as well so before I could brunois a shallot properly or make fish stock I went on the internet and spent eight or nine hundred dollars on rare Japanese chef's knives and that was well more than a whole paycheck for
[00:44] me at the time so it wasn't like that smart to do. Over the years I grew to really love handmade expensive knives but in the back of my mind I was always worried that they were going to get stolen or that I was going to do something to them that would damage them. So all this is to say that
[00:58] After many years of working in various types of restaurants, the knives that have really stuck with me are the ones that are the most affordable, the ones that are the most easily replaced, and the ones that do the job well. They don't have to do it perfectly, but they do it well.
[01:10] Before I get into specific brand recommendations, I think it's a good idea to talk about the three styles of knives that I use and how I use them. Together, in my opinion, all three of these knives should cover 100% of the daily use cases in the home kitchen.
[01:24] At the end of the video I'll throw on a fourth knife that's kind of a special use case that in my opinion is a knife to have. If you really want to build out your home knife kit that would be a great one to add on. So the first and smallest knife is a paring knife.
[01:36] This is a four inch version of this knife and that's a little bit longer than is usual. I think these are usually about three inches. I go for a longer version because for me the four inch kind of bridges the gap between a traditional paring knife and what is known as a utility knife which is usually about five or six inches.
[01:51] Herring knives are really good for precision work like breaking down a chicken or cutting smaller fruits and vegetables. If I need to cut a lot of something though I'll usually grab a larger knife but on weak knives especially if I'm just cutting brussel sprouts in half or I need to cut down
[02:03] some lettuce I keep a bigger knife and bigger cutting board in the cabinet so I don have to clean as much stuff The second essential knife in my kit is an offset serrated knife Emphasis on the offset part I really prefer this offset angle because it makes the knife sit in your hands just like a regular chef knife would
[02:19] When cutting large loads of bread too, there's no better tool in my opinion. But of course, this knife is good for more than just cutting bread. Soft fruits and vegetables like pineapple, tomatoes, eggplants. The serrated edge makes quick work of that skin but doesn't smash the soft flesh inside.
[02:34] In my opinion, you really don't want an expensive serrated knife. There's a lot of brands out there that will sell you one for well over $100, but the reason I think that's silly is that you really can't sharpen a serrated knife.
[02:46] It's not physically impossible. Some of you guys out there might have a little file that you could get in between these little teeth, but you're probably not going to do that, and it's probably not going to work very well. So my recommendation is to buy the right $30 serrated knife and then use it until it's dull,
[03:01] which in the hands of a home cook would take many, many years. I've had this one specifically for about 4 years now and that was after it was already used at the bakery to cut about 500 or 600 loaves of bread. And if you're very serious about the structural integrity of your sandwiches, which you should
[03:16] be, a straight edge knife is really the only way to properly cut one of those in half. Last knife in my home kit is the most obvious one and that's a chef's knife. In my opinion if you really had to you could do 100% of your daily cutting tasks with just
[03:28] this knife. I use this knife for everything from dicing onions, cutting potatoes, breaking down larger chunks of meat into smaller ones. I cut greens with it. I cut lettuce with it. The chef's knife is the most comfortable option to do all of these tasks and in my opinion since the blade is larger
[03:43] than a utility knife or a paring knife it makes the work a lot easier and faster. This knife in particular is 10 inches. I go for the longer version of this knife because I feel like it gives me a little bit more control but if you're a true beginner with no knife skills I think an
[03:57] eight inch version of the chef's knife is going to give you a little bit more comfort and a little bit more control. So to get into brand specifics here there are two major brands that I like using that in my opinion are pretty much interchangeable. That's because their product lines are almost identical and any professional
[04:12] restaurant kitchen that you go into you're gonna find representatives of both knife brands sitting on tables The brands I talking about are the Swiss brand Victorino and the American brand Dexter Russell Over the years I used a mix of both brands Specifically right now my chef knife is Dexter and my serrated and
[04:29] pairings are Victorinox. Again for me there's no noticeable difference in these knives. If you're a knife nerd you can probably school me on that all day but for all intents and purposes in terms of usage they're the same to me. So the question still remains, hey Bri why does a chef boy like
[04:43] you think expensive chef knives aren't worth it? Well to be clear I do think you should have good tool. It's just that I don't think good tools necessarily need to cost a lot of money. For example, this knife costs about 40 bucks. This knife from Japan, which I really do like, don't
[04:59] get me wrong, it cost about $300 when I bought it. Is it nine times as fun to use or as sharp or as effective at cutting vegetables? No, it's maybe 10% better, if that. This cheaper knife's been in my
[05:11] house for about four years, and as you can see, it's definitely got some miles on it and it won't lasts forever, but I use it way more than my expensive knife. The main reason is that this cheap knife is a lot easier to keep sharp. Japanese knives take a lot more skill and attention to
[05:24] detail to get properly sharpened. Yes, they will get sharper, but because you need skills to do that, it never really gets as sharp as I'd like. The cheap knife, on the other hand, can be brought back to sharpness pretty easily with a little honing rod like this, and that's it. You knock
[05:36] off the edge back into alignment, and it temporarily makes this knife quite sharp, and that's usually what I do. Look, I love spending money on kitchen equipment. Check out my $250 cutting board or my $300 Dutch oven or my $400 blender. But I don't think you need these
[05:51] things to make food taste good. They marginally improve the experience of cooking and I'm all for that. But anyone who needs to cook dinner every single night on a warped cutting board with a really crappy dull knife knows how painful that can be. But of course, delicious food is made with
[06:05] great ingredients by people who care, not by expensive fancy equipment. So if you're like a knife head and you want to spend a lot of money on knives, that's cool. I totally support you. I think knives are cool, but for me, the best bang for buck is something like this.
[06:18] It's like the Toyota Corolla of the knife world. If you're interested in specifics, I'll link to all of these knives down in the description. And I guess I should mention that this video is not sponsored by any of these knife brands,
[06:30] but it is sponsored by Surfshark VPN What a VPN Well it a virtual private network or to put it more simply it a system that keeps your computer and information a lot more secure Basically a VPN can hide the identity of your computer and its location so that any bad guys out there can't
[06:46] crack your code. For example, when Lori and I were in France last fall, we still had to run the YouTube channel, and luckily thanks to Surfshark and their military-grade encryption, we could access our Google account and our bank information without having to worry about some
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[07:28] Surfshark. Right now you get 83% off your subscription plus three free months. That's a lot of free months. Click the link in my description, 83% off plus three free months. Thank you, Surfshark. So I truly believe that all the knives that I mentioned earlier would be a full kit, but if you
[07:43] wanted to have one more knife, I would recommend going for this one. This is a fillet knife, also known as a boning knife, and it's only about 25 bucks and it's super useful for taking off fat and silver skin from large pieces of meat. You could slice roast beef super thin with it, or just
[07:58] cutting vegetables like I do with a paring knife. Boney knives are super skinny and bendy, and that makes them really nimble, so you can do some jobs with this that you really can't do comfortably with the other knife. That isn't to say that this knife is totally essential, but the job that it's
[08:11] good for, it's really good for. So, boney knife. Anyways, that's my opinion about knives. Let me know in the comments what you guys think. What kind of knives do you guys use? I really want to know. As always, thank you so much for your time and attention. Thank you for sticking around to
[08:25] the end, and we'll see you next time. Oh, and you know what? I haven't said this in a while, but if you support this channel on Ko-fi, thank you guys very much. If you don't know what Ko-fi is, I'll link to that down in the description. Thank you guys. That support goes right into making these
[08:38] videos better. See you next time.