Equipment Review: Best Carbon-Steel Chef's Knives & Our Testing Winner

carbon steel chef's knives have a certain mystique their reputation among chefs is that they're superior because they can supposedly take on a finer sharper edge we decided to get to the bottom of this are they really better than regular stainless steel chefs knives carbon steel knives have been around a long time they went out of favor several decades ago when stainless steel came along stainless basically means rust resistant while carbon steel gets a blackish coloring as you use it and it rusts if it's not kept clean and dry you shouldn't leave a carbon steel knife in the sink or with food sitting on it and some chefs even wipe the blade between each cut so there's certainly much more fussy to maintain than stainless steel but if they really performed much better they might be worthwhile you've bought eight carbon steel knives for Western and for Japanese their price from about $80 to $300 we asked a mix of trained chefs and home cooks men and women to take each knife through a series of tests mincing parsley dicing onions quartering butternut squash and butchering whole raw chickens then we evaluated each knives handle blade and overall design now just as with any type of knife comfort is a factor handles that are too sharp or narrow stressed our hands if they're too long they got in the way the best ones had nice smooth handles and give us multiple grip options so everybody's hands felt comfortable and secure next we focused on the business end the blade a really sharp agile blade moves through food with less force and more precision and that feeling of sharpness is determined by two factors first how thin the edges the v-shaped cutting edge on the blade is measured by angle and we found that the narrower that V the better narrower blades slid through food rather than forcing it apart like a wedge and it turns out the knives we like the best we're very narrow their sharp into an angle of just 10 to 15 degrees on either side of the blade the ones we like least were wider at 20 degrees per side the second part of sharpness is strength and that's determined by the kind of steel used and how the blade is heat treated think about baking a cake the choice of your ingredients is important but so is how you mix the batter how hot the oven is and how long it's baked all of those things are going to affect the finish cake our knife makers wouldn't tell us any details of their recipes so we started by looking at each knife's rockwell rating the rockwell scale is a hardness scale and it measures the strength of the metal sure enough we noticed the higher the rockwell meaning the harder the steel the better the knife performed in our tests next we took our knives over to mi t--'s Department of Materials Science & Engineering where they used a high-powered digital microscope to zoom in on the edge of what our testers said were the sharpest and the dullest knives the contrast was astounding under the microscope the dullest knife a French blade from subbatch ei looked battered and rounded like a weathered mountain ridge the sharpest highest ranking knife was designed by master bladesmith Bob Kramer and made by his willing J a henckles under the microscope the Kramer knife looked like fishing wire was straight and narrow as the tip of a needle so no wonder the tester said the sbatch a felt like cutting with a spoon and the Kramer and I felt samurai sharp always taught us one really important lesson all carbon steel knives are not the same it really depends on how it's made we did choose a favorite carbon steel knife the Kramer by Henkels but wouldn't you know that's the one that cost $300 so we couldn't help but wonder how compared to our longtime favorite stainless steel knife the Victorinox 8-inch swiss army fiber our chef's knife it's only 40 dollars so for a final test we pitted brand-new copies of the Kramer knife and the Victorinox against one another in a series of challenges now out of the box both were equally sharp so to see how long their edges would last we put a cutting board on a scale to guarantee that each cut would have exactly 20 pounds of pressure and then we made rockin cuts as if we were chopping vegetables then we slashed sheets of paper to test their sharpness after every 10 strokes so we could track the changes now seven hours and five thousand cuts per knife later those two blades were still as sharp as the first cut so next we used each knife to butcher five whole raw chickens and chop five rock-hard butternut squash then we asked testers to slice Tomatoes and rate which blade felt sharper and again it was nearly impossible to tell so we brought out the bane knives everywhere a glass cutting board glass absolutely Rex blades ten strokes each and then I've still moved through the paper but not as smoothly by 50 strokes they both started to make jagged uneven cuts through the paper but the Kramer still felt slightly sharper and a hundred strokes the Kramer was definitely sharper but only by a little margin both knives were still able to slice through onions very easily so do we recommend a carbon steel knife yes if you're willing to keep it dry and you have the cash the Kramer is a showstopper beautifully crafted it's visually stunning and it's really fun to use we found a cheaper carbon steel option which is our best buy for 9850 the togi Haro virgin carbon steel Guto is slightly less sharp but it still wowed our testers but for just $39.99 the Victorinox surprised us again for everyday use this knife is pretty amazing so how could this cheap little knife keep up it's all about the grain of the steel tight finely grained steel can be honed to a thinner edge without breaking and it makes the whole knife stronger the theory is that carbon steels are finer grained than stainless because the chromium in stainless steel tends to combine with carbon and create these large brittle clumps in the grain of the knife called chromium carbide they're microscopic clumps but they poke out of the edge and they're easily dinged out of place and they leave a pit on the cutting surface they also weaken the knife overall because they form larger grains so we took the Victorinox and the Kramer knives to the Boston University photonics Center where they put them inside their half million dollars scanning electron microscope under extreme magnification the Kramer Henkels knife had a nice tight grain but so did the Victorinox we found chromium carbide x' in the Victorinox but they were small they were not large enough to weaken the blade so we concluded that some of today's knife makers like Victorinox have found ways to solve the problem of large chromium carbide x' to make stronger more uniform stainless steels and in the end when the results are that close the bottom line for us has to be practical we're still going to use our Victorinox stainless knife it's low maintenance and cheap that is the best tool in our kitchen

Channel: America's Test Kitchen

Views: 1,175,196

Rating: 4.8350067 out of 5

Keywords: knife, knives, cooking, equipment, cook, chef, test, America's Test Kitchen, carbon steel

Id: e50gujs4l-I

Length: 6min 41sec (401 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 03 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/WhosWhosWho]

TL;DW

• High-carbon, stainless steel knives are good, when taken care of.

[u/blahable]

I don't understand why they were focusing so much on the handle shape, balance, spine comfort, etc. in the beginning of the video when those aspects have nothing uniquely to do with carbon-steel knives. They really should only be comparing the cutting performance, edge retention, durability and rust/stain resistance between high-carbon knives and low-carbon knives.

I also don't like that they compared knives with factory edges. Some manufacturers make really great knives (in terms of the actual steel and blade shape) but have very poor factory sharpening. MAC is a pretty good example of this. They make high-quality knives but their factory edge is dismal. I think a better apple to apple comparison would have been to have the same person sharpen all of the knives first and then have people test the knives. I also think that would have given them another important data point to include in the comparison: ease of sharpening.

[u/BobC813]

A few years ago you could get that Victorinox for $25, now it's $40. I wonder if that has anything to do with the fact that ATK always talks about how great that knife is.

[u/IsolatedHonesty]

Finally my irrational love for the victorinox has a rational.

[u/mastercerde]

I have a tojiro kiritsuke I got from Amazon and is by far my to go knife. Great for veg prep and such. It had cut my prep time almost in half by how effortless I can cut things now.

[u/[deleted]]

Carbons are beast...period

[u/[deleted]]

I have an old old old Chinese carbon chef knife I got from a garage sale. It's a huge square, and I love breaking it out. It looks crapy to those who don't know, but It's blade is so thin and is the sharpest knife I own. More so than my Japanese Damascus, high carbon Henkles, wustoff and cutco(I know you hate me now, but I like some of the knives) and my hunting and filet knives.

[u/oversteppe]

never seen a SS knife take an edge quite like carbon. that being said, carbon takes much more work in the beginning when you are developing the patina. some steels like acid to form it, but I've found if you have a wrought iron casing over a high carbon core, it actually wants rare, fatty meat, rubbed all over it, to develop an iridescent patina