How Much Should You Spend On A Chef's Knife?

hey welcome back to the average kitchen today we're going to test out three kitchen knives through a series of tests to see which one we think is the best one for you to buy at home the home cook that you are so we have a dal strong shogun series very fancy box very fancy presentation we have my old trusty hinkle now i've had this for probably five years and then uh this one that jamie picked out made by mercer we believe is how you pronounce that company name that is this one right here which is i believe a seven inch jamie or nine inch jamie doesn't know but we can have a look at it came in beautiful packaging eight inch so they're all roughly the same size uh so we'll have a look here at this uh dow strung i must say i've seen them on instagram i follow them they make some really cool stuff but i've never bought one of their products so when we bought that we're not i should say we're not sponsored by any of these companies we're just doing these independent uh reviews on knives that we bought ourselves so this uh shogun series shows it's a japanese super steel it is quite impressive when you open up this box now i have not used this knife yet full disclaimer i did wash it i guess like a cleaning cloth some literature and then this really kind of fancy sheath this is kind of an intimidating looking knife not for the faint of heart not for the faint of heart so we're gonna be obviously careful with that like you are with any knives so what we're gonna do today in this video is we're going to cut some tomato because i think tomatoes a good sort of measuring stick for knives cut some peppers the tops off some garlic which for myself i like to roast garlic and if you don't have a really sharp knife if you're just trying to lock that top of your garlic off to be able to roast those bulbs you need to have a good knife and then when i was doing some research to do this video i came across a video that talked about the onion test and i thought it was quite interesting and it said that if your knife is dull or you don't have a good quality knife when you go to cut an onion it'll slid off slip off the paper that you see here with a sharp knife it'll sort of hook in muckle into that onion and go right through it so we're going to give that a try and then we're going to do the old trusty paper test [Music] so because this hinkle i've had for roughly uh five years uh it is the german made hinkle i am going to give it a quick sherpin and the things that we're going to talk about is the weight and the balance of the knife in your hand the level of comfort how does it feel how does it perform they all clean pretty much the same big point a little pro tip for you do not put your expensive knives in the dishwasher the handles if they're not one piece sometimes the handles can retain water and sometimes they can get little rust spots on them because of the temperature of the dishwasher so you definitely don't want to do that so let's give the hinkle a try first i've never done this paper test so bear with me so a little bit of a cut but not really impressive the mercer jamie's knife okay a couple tries got through it and we'll try the dallas wrong the paper test maybe not the best measuring stick because i think it depends on how you hold the paper but i wanted to try it because i thought it'd be kind of fun uh to see how it works [Music] let's try a tomato so as most of you know that cutting a tomato sometimes especially if it's really ripe can be challenging so i'm going to do my best and i don't proclaim to have amazing knife skills but i'm going to try to slice this pretty thin so that actually pretty good all right we'll try the mercer so thin but not paper thin but again that could just be my skill set how easy is it going through fairly easy with very little push and met with very little resistance we'll try the dial strong now so the dow strong certainly seems to be pretty consistently pretty thin now in fairness to that everybody knows this i don't know why or when you would ever cut a paper thin slice of tomato but if you're slicing tomato it certainly goes through it quite easily so let's do a couple of those with one of the other knives here so again seems to cut them relatively easily all of them can you rank the knives in the tomato test i would say and i'm not biased because i was i had chosen this dial strong but maybe it's the weight of it the size of it it just seemed to feel the best that just slid through the tomato there's no doubt that all of these cut the tomato quite well the next day jamie had suggested hey do you want me to bring back to your place this kind of older knife that he's had for quite a long time value on this jamie roughly price well it came in a set i'm going to say the set certainly under 100 okay so this was jamie's go-to knife kind of cool looking so we have another tomato here and i just wanted to see if how this sort of budget knife works uh slicing a tomato so as you remember yesterday we tried to go super thin okay so that took a little bit of effort but definitely getting there but it requires a lot more pressure than i was using before so as far as just ease it certainly cuts the tomato would this work yes a hundred percent uh it's functional it's pretty well balanced um maybe not as comfortable as my in my hand as the other knives that we tried budget knife works pretty good yesterday so just just look them up real quick because they had forgot what we paid so this one the dalstrom they call this a chef cleaver hybrid which is kind of interesting and you could see based on the look of it it would definitely meet that description 160 canadian purchased on amazon uh we will put the links in the description below the video if you're interested in ordering a knife but again we're not affiliated with any of these companies uh the mercer 90 is what the cost on this one was canadian uh it may be a scenario and jamie mentioned this just off camera it may be a scenario i'll get what you pay for or maybe it's not but there's no doubt that if you've done any kind of home cooking or any type of food prep you know that the worst possible thing is to have a dull knife let's try the onion test [Music] so let's start it with the uh we'll start it with the mercer so it should in theory okay so you could i don't know if you can see there jamie it didn't really grab but it's not slipping off either so that was pretty good the hinkle sort of grabbed and let's try this one here okay right away i don't know if you can see that jamie it it really grabbed a hold of that really quick and there's no slipping and again you could now i didn't try that cutting those onions really thin with the other knives i could do that but so i grabbed another another onion here we're just going to try a different angle so instead of giving it that ability to grab on just coming straight down it so this is the ankle so you can see i'm not pushing hard but it's certainly not jumping into it so this one much better than the hinkle but nowhere near as good as the dalstrom the dow strong with virtually no pressure whatsoever slides right through um that onion with with no pressure so on this test i would rate dow strong number one mercer number two hinkle number three i think a good point is if you've never had a really good quality or high-end knife you may not know what you're missing or what how easy it could be to cut things until you try one of these [Music] so we've got three peppers here let's give this a try there's always different ways to cut peppers the way i generally do it i think works pretty well to try to avoid a bunch of seeds ending up everywhere basically no waste a little bit not much so what i would normally do here is just cut those into strips so skin side up which i normally wouldn't do because then you can't see if there's that um sort of bitter membrane there but it certainly hooks on to the pepper very very easily that was the dow strong so let's try the uh mercer same sort of technique just start at the top and just sort of run your knife along that edge so really with minimal effort and i mean i'm not doing enough that i have like i said fast knife skills but not trying to do anything fast here or fancy just trying to let the knife do the work and not fight against it but realistically really really cuts very nice we'll try the skin side up which again i wouldn't normally do but can be a little bit more challenging for the knife like pretty impressed cuts really really well i am always impressed with when you watch these professional chefs and their their their skill set with with a knife is pretty impressive and let's try the old trusty hinkle with this orange pepper so i can already tell that it's certainly not cutting it's cutting fine but it's not cutting as smooth as the other two knives so again cuts really well try it skin side up so a little bit more effort to try to get it to bite into that skin but still overall really good [Music] i think they call this a garlic braid at the store what we want to do is just slightly slice the top of the garlic through the paper and just take the tops of all of the garlic bulbs contained within it put some tin foil around it pour some olive oil salt pepper wrap it into the oven roast it and if you've never roasted garlic and you like garlic it's next level so let's give this a try here and see what happens so the paper sometimes can be slippery that did a really good job now i missed a couple here so let's try the mercer so i had to push a little bit harder still did a pretty good job but again missed a couple and let's try old faithful here hinkle the hinkle did the best job i may have added a push a little harder overall i would say all three of those knives performed well in that test had having never used this one before the dow strong or jamie's mercer i could tell you that because they're all high-end knives they all feel really good in your hand this one feels really balanced feels really really good i think that um and i know there's a fancy name for these do you know what these are called jamie i think these will help sometimes things not stick to your knife so that's a good feature but i don't remember what those are called the hank hall has a bit of a longer handle which i like as opposed to this one doesn't sit quite uh all the way past my hand and i do have kind of bigger hands but um that one has a bit of a longer handle which i like this one again has the same sort of length handle as that again really really well balanced looks badass uh super intimidating looking knife actually this this knife here is almost twice the price as the other knives so in theory it should be twice as good i don't know is it twice as good no it's not twice as good is it really good absolutely but as far as a budget like a higher end budget knife this for 90 dollars will do everything that you would ever need as far as um you know a decent price knife for the quality and for the performance of it pretty impressed now you can already see and this could be because jamie did put in the dishwasher i could already see some discoloration on the um i don't know what the like rivets almost that they used to put the handle together the dowel strung obviously came in an amazing box and package and you know came with some literature and stuff like that versus this and we did have to buy um a sheath for the mercer in fairness i think it was like five bucks but you did have to buy that separately so that's our video hope you liked it leave me a comment tell me what kind of knife you used and what uh you look for in a knife and we will be sure to get back to you thanks for tuning in we'll see on the next one [Music]

Channel: The Average Kitchen

Views: 3,749

Keywords: best chef knife, best chefs knife, best kitchen knife, best knives, chef knife, chef knife review, chef knives, chef's knife, dalstrong chef & cleaver hybrid knife, dalstrong chef & cleaver hybrid knife - 8, dalstrong chef knife - 8 - shogun series, kitchen knife, kitchen knives, mercer culinary 8-inch chef's knife, mercer culinary renaissance, mercer culinary renaissance 8-inch forged chef's knife, mercer culinary renaissance 8-inch forged chef's knife review

Id: AoOOIbJ0Xng

Length: 13min 41sec (821 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 09 2022