How To Choose The Perfect Knife - 4 Things To Consider

well here you came from Cuba you brought David a very special bottle this is a Havana Club seven year I want your professional opinion on Cuban rum Megan you are you Rangers yeah of course all right hmm oh good so their drink is called Cuba Libre which is basically this and Cola ha nice oh yeah yeah that's what it's called cutely relatives I just take the ice yeah nice stuff well thank you very much my pleasure I have never had to a cigar or Cuban and all this stuff it's hard to get I have a husband ma'am we'll send some to you we'll send some to you when you're back so yeah we're nice merchants here oh love stopping by and seeing our friend David and of course Megan here thank you so much for taking care of our heroes followers and fans and I love to see what's new so well I thought what I do today is try and do a little video and trying to help people how to choose a knife okay oh that's great I know which one's heroes using and things like this but as far as some people are trying to buy a chef's knife and things in it I think there's a lot of confusion and it's something I do for a lot of culinary students when they're trying to figure out which chef's knife is best for them so I think well let's just give that kind of a tutorial here to your fans and and maybe help them to be enlightened on the process because there's a lot of product out there right now okay perfect and here's a superstar bill Oh bill everybody says how eloquent you speak when you were talking about nice well thank you appreciate that oh yeah just uh pack up some stuff yeah yeah yeah I'm not sharpening along actually he could so let's go here camera guy during the process of making knife down there the something slipped out of the top right hang himself in the head signed it oh that's what happened there oh yeah using that ruggedly handsome look yeah the head is Luminara yeah so you're driving out for the for the new football team win you guys all had the Rams here no they were the same you a Chargers charge on now hello what they are we don't care anymore you don't care anyway it's like we just gave up on the NFL say okay that's they gave us our Sundays back is basically how that played out yeah but I'm going to talk about with the knife and this is kind of an interesting thing that I found that even a lot of the knife vendors seem to be unaware of when I'm talking about knife shapes in the different countries that use knives differently so when they are looking to choose a chef's knife I think first you have to look at what your cutting style is because there are three very distinct shapes on the knife on a German knife the tip is way up here almost in direct line with the spine it's a very rounded and it is very well suited for this type of a rocking cut if you are doing tap chopping squash and things like that the sweet spot is way down here up by the heel nobody really makes a true French knife anymore so ba ta make some knives still I am not happy with the quality of Sabathia the old ones were outstanding so this is the closest example we have to a French knife and that's Mac on a French knife the tip of the knife is pretty much in midline with the blade and it's also skinnier than a traditional chef's knife when you get into Japanese knives we call Guto and not chef knife and the tip is much closer to the edge they can be much flatter this is probably not a great example this is my old Masahiro Carbon knife here not so much rocking motion it is still capable of doing a rocking motion but it comes off more like using a paper cutter something where you're hammering down these are designed more for a slicing motion and then I think it's important to understand how you slice whether you are somebody who tends to pull the knife backwards as you cut or where you push forward if you're pulling backwards blade width is not that much of a problem if you're pushing forward I like to have more blades so it stays in line with the knuckles for my purpose not being adept at Asian cuisine I like a knife to be in contact with my fingers all the time so I I like the rocking cut however it is too a third of most of our dicing steps if I'm doing an onion for instance I'm chopping them coming around slicing at this direction and when I spin it around for that final cut that's where we're actually doing the rocking motion and I do a lot of walking with the knife in this direction here so first you look at where the tip is located and decide do I want a German I want a French shape or do I want a Japanese Yuto the second thing you'd be looking at is the belly here's an example in tion tonight that I've recently switched to this is a shin konso this is not their hammered Damascus that most people are familiar with but it tapers back just very slightly at the heel so the first time that I picked this knife up and started using it I found that as I was doing a lot of my cutting I was not going all the way through the vegetable because the sweet spot on this one is right here the thing tapers upward if the heel tapers upward at the tip and it forces you to move the knife forward a little bit and which is a more traditional motion for a classically trained chef it was kind of very eye-opening to me because that's the way that I cut for many years knives in a restaurant when I got in a knife business all my knives are so sharp that it kind of got away from correct knife techniques I am NOT working eight hours a day they're all razor sharp so you can just sit there and drop them all through the product and there's nothing to it but when I pick up the shun konso I'm like oh no wait a minute that's why I was supposed to be cutting in the way I was used to it so I love that knife very rustic handle with Corby bolts on it I find that guys like this knife and women hate it like that that's just uncomfortable what do they have this little lanyard here for it's like I don't know you can throw a leather lace around it tie it to wrist I have no idea but I don't hate it the steel has been tumbled this is an aus ten steel which we call a high molybdenum content steel normally they're very mere polished and it's really hard to keep that mirror polished so I think was pretty smart of them to just I don't throw in a clothes dryer with nuts and bolts or whatever they do to get that tumbled appearance and then sell it to you so we don't have to worry about little minor scratches on it they pre scratch State for us that's great like it so after you look at and say okay this is my style of chopping and I have been able to decide whether I want German French or Japanese and design then the next thing it has to be comfortable so we look at the handle handles a very difficult thing on internet purchases we have it easy in restaurants because you can always walk over to the guy next to you and say hey I'm not going to use your knife but can I just hold it and see how it feels and things like that some of them are very big and bulky if you have a large hand a Victorinox knife is great at the end thing is a grip I am always under the assumption that everybody grips a knife like this and that's just not true many people will grab a knife in this kind of a fashion in the home or with the finger over the top would stuff on this classic icon has what I call a little hump back design on the handle this one you know I test all of the knives before agreeing to sell them this one I took home and I had a lot of trouble with it for the first couple of days I just found it to be very awkward it's not something that I'm used to and I really disliked it when I first began using it but I forced myself after a couple days I really really like this it firms up very squarely to the palm of your hand it kind of locks my wrist I find that I do much better when I am peeling oranges making diagonal cuts and things like that it locked in very securely I still chose not to use it in my set because I have so many knives that don't have that that I either want them all to have be classic icon are none of them with that particular handle design the ideal knife for me is one when I pick it up I just don't notice it I don't really want to think about the knives it's kind of an odd thing for a knife merchants to say but I am NOT a nice beak I like food so to me all of this is just a tool it's a function of what you do to produce the correct food so all the knives that I buy Here I am a little bit snobby and if there some of them that I don't carry because I look I'd say look I don't like that I don't think it's going to work well for people I know there's some people are happy with it but in general I don't want returns an unhappy customer so if there's some of them that look at say their inherent flaws to this and even though some people swear by it I choose not to carry that one so after picking up the handle and these are just something that has to be done by feel on an Internet retailer like ours by the way you can always return these it is absolutely known that you might pick that knife up and feel it and say yeah I'm unhappy with it I have some customers that I've known for many years and it was buy three and four nine three times say you know I'm going to be sending one or two of these back and say yeah absolutely grab the ones decide what you're comfortable with and return the others shifting is not a huge expense these days it's something that we're happy to do after you've decided the tip that you like the handle shape then we start getting into the world of different types of Steel's and here's where it gets really conflicted because there's so much information out there so let me just start with the basic there is a stamped steel versus forged steel in Europe and in the United States we have the capability of stamping a blade or up forging a blade that means that we can take a billet of steel heat it up put it into a mold have a hydraulic hammer come down from the ceiling and smash this knife into the shape and we eject it into oil or water depending on their particular type of metal and forging techniques at that point that steel is pretty darn hard so now when you start grinding away everything that doesn't look like a knife and preparing it for its final shaping its handling it's going to be labor-intensive so on a forged knife nobody is really bothering to make a cheap one you have so much expense in the labor of producing it that you might as well use a decent quality steel and try and get some money for your finished product a Stan's knife can go to both extremes this is a Victorinox they had been sold in the United States as Fortuner for many many years but Victorinox the red-handled Swiss Army knife company's ones who had made them they make a very good steel this is generally a commercial grade knife most of the meatpacking plants and poultry processors on the west coast use Victorinox for some reason on East Coast they tend more towards Dexter Russell but this is a very good commercial grade knife and pretty inexpensive you're going to be getting something in a range of these our map price controlled by the manufacturers so I think there are about forty five dollars on that pricing and a boning knife around seventeen so they're inexpensive but they use the good quality steel now on a stamp knife you have a sheet of steel that is made in whatever thickness you want two two and a half three millimeter sheets it's soft it's an annealed State you pull that out and when they say stamped it's because you can use something looks just like a cookie cutter and punch that shape out on some of the better knives I use lasers to cut on higher quality field but you can stamp it out you can punch the holes for your handle shape it any way that you want for a knife and then do the hardening afterward so if you wanted to make a really cheap knife that hangs into the grocery store stamped is a way to go that thing said all of these knives coming out of Japan are stamped knives not the minato-ku Nate and some of the traditional knives like this where you have seen the guy hammering and pounding that's a different style of forging technique but looking at knee knots for instance this right here is I don't know somewhere between 550 and 750 dollars I'd have to check my prices on it but that knife will be a stamp knife it will be cut out with lasers this part that you see here is called the bolster that metal that soldered on after the fact you can't even really see it because they do such a good job of polishing these out at the end but it is the blade is running all the way through and then they add these parts after the fact so stamped no longer means a cheap knife or Jame guarantee you that you're getting a decent quality but stamps really runs the gamut from ultra-expensive to ultra cheap so after we get rid of the guy concept of Staunton Forge then we start talking about steel types in Germany and in the most part in the u.s. they what has been popularized is a 420 440 series let's say a 400 series of steel that it's a decent seal it can be hardened up to a reasonable rockwell hardness of 6061 but they will generally leave this anywhere from 54 to 58 steel that is that soft is very easy to resharpen as you're using the knife and the edge rolls over you can just bring it back over and over again with a honing rod the downside to it is a honing rod becomes part of your museum plot so when I'm working the restaurant I have the knife here I have my honing rod over there I made ice three Tomatoes wife and I hit it with a hunting rod and come back and dice three more so a lot of people like I just do not want to be fooling with my knife that much so give me a harder steel meatpackers by the way in particular always want to softer steel this is something they need a razor-sharp knife they have to keep production going all day they really move these guys fast particularly in the slaughterhouses where it's on a hook these things are moving if their knife gets dull they have to work faster to get ahead of the line take a little polishing rod here and unhone and it's a hard night see I forget the term that I'm looking for here but to rub it hard burnish and you want to burnish the edge on a polishing rod catch back up and start breaking down the meat again if you make it too hard they cannot stop and run to a stone or knife sharpener so they like their steel particularly soft for that purpose so when you start hardening it up there are very different types of steel you know I think I should back up one step and talk about how to look for a good grind because a knife should be tapered a knife starts thick at the bolster and it needs to have a nice taper from the bolster down to the tip it also needs to be tapered this way from the spine down to the edge of course you would expect Gustave to do an excellent job with that and they do in fact the vast majority of these are going to meet that demand this is an example of a knife when they don't want to spend any money on it this is a Mercer knife I sell Mercer knife this has its use this is what we use for breaking down a lot of lobster and things like that's what we call a beater knife in the kitchen you don't want to spend a lot of money on it because you're going to be doing horrible things a lap and king-crab when you're chopping that that tip that comes off the leg and cutting them into sections and things like this you are just not going to do that with a good quality knife there's no reason it's taking terrible abuse so you take this knife and it's completely flat stock they did not try to taper that knife at all they just took it flat and then this is what they call a hollow ground edge on that hollow ground adds you have two wheels that roll through and they put a quick down and dirty edge on a knife like this they have send it in this area you'll find it's actually a little bit thicker out on the very cutting edge the apex that it is down in here but whenever you see that kind of a line on a knife you know that this is somebody who did not want to spend the money on doing a full face grind this is the most expensive part and a lot of the most skill required on making knife is how they taper that these are just a blunt instrument you can see that there's no taper from here to the tip just no work being done on it rip it through a machine and the price will show you know this has its purpose as I say it's your beater knife so that's one good indicator if you see that a knife i really suggest passing on it who poured about doing the dirty dirty work if you if you need we don't like that yet and and then in mercer by the way makes good Steel's is a very good company and something that we put into a lot of culinary kits this is they have different lines of knives also this is the Mercer millenia and all of their other millennium knives are fully tapered they have a wide 8 inch chef's knife and a wide tenon chef's knife that are designed specifically for the beter purpose so I really don't mean to denigrate Mercer the company makes great products they make them for the industry and they knew what they were doing with this when they were making it for a specific reason - so that was hard to choose which knife I'm going to come down here and beat up and say yeah this is a hologram knife you don't want it if you have a most part in the home you're not going to use something like that right so then the steals I start kind of trying to lay them out in terms of hardness as you start getting a knife thinner and harder you run the risk of chipping so the amount of money to spend a knife used to be an indicator of something that would not chip so much on you but I've seen a lot of weird things coming onto the market market here there's some dull strong knives that claim to be vg-10 they're made in China they look beautiful I would probably have bought one and then when we come home with when they bring to us and we start to sharpen them that Colie tell they actually did a hologram on the end it's a flat stockin with all the Damascus cladding and a hammer who couldn't tell and then when you get to sharpen it it just melts away when you touch on the stone so so when you get into the steel types each steel is has its own specific properties this is an example Glee stain and Masahiro this is what we call proprietary steel it's not going to be reproduced by any other company if they are big enough it can come in with their own blend and they're kind of unique this one is like a 59 on a rockwell hardness Glee stain is the name of that company I actually like leasing the chef's knife that I use in conjunction with this ugly carbon thing is a 10-inch Glee stain and that's because this weird thing with the scallops actually works you may have heard them referred to as a Grant and edge because the grant and knife company in Sheffield England was the first one to put these kinds of things on a knife but this is not the way they did it they ran all the way down to the edge and they're opposite each other so they would effectively thin the blade those grants are for slicing knives when you're taking meat and taking a long slicing motion like this the moisture from that causes a lot of friction and a lot of adherence so when you're trying on a buffet line and things like that's where you want to take one nice clean cut you don't want to be sawing back and forth I grant the knife works well also these long flexible slices can be very difficult to sharpen on a stone the grant the knife with that thinned edge you just use a honing rod it's not even going to work on a stone so that's what a grant and edge is and it actually works on a Glee stain you will see it on a million-one knives here's an example on this chroma it's particularly on a santoku you'll see these things and that kind of came about because there was a television program and whoo staff had a knife that they were testing out and this girl used that knife and it was Rachael Ray doing her 30-minute show everybody loved Rachael Ray who loved that knife they sold thousands of them but a santoku of all knives really really flat on the bottom almost no camera this knife is to be designed to be used in an up-and-down motion like this although you can get a little bit of chopping motion that's not its forte and these do nothing for knife being used in that position and there are some people say well I feel that it glides through a little easier when I say does nothing I promise you the potato slice is still going to stick to it and it won't them it so that's why I use this although I'm not a santoku guy on my chef's knife when I'm dicing potatoes and things like this it's no longer function where I take a slice and then try and hold the potato in place fly back the knife away or you know flip it off with these you can just lay them down and go to town so they're expensive but it was worth it to me I spent 275 on my chef's knife but it sped my work up so much that that might pay for itself so when we're looking at the steel Tyson we're these ones right here you're looking at something that would come up in the range of 56 to 58 Rockwell hardness you get to like a 59 on some of these proprietary Steel's matsuhiro again proprietary steel they'll do 59 to 60 and then we can start talking about steel types that you may find throughout different brands this is a molybdenum steel this is a molybdenum steel now being too much of a steel wok the advantage to a molybdenum steel it's is it's a grain filler the best grain that you can get is on a carbon knife these are what they call virgin carbon when they say virgin carbon they mean no recycled product has been used in the manufacture of that knife so it is just carbon and iron and it makes it very tight very perfect grain this one is masa here I seldom Akiko Ichi Matsumoto makes them if you're looking for these traditional knives I don't care what brand it is they may be a little bit different in thickness a little difference in handle size very little difference in shapes but as far as the steel makes no difference pick the one that you're comfortable with on the shape and don't even worry about the steel this one right here has patina'd you can expect them to gray and get a little ugly and blemished like this red rust is what we want to avoid as long as it's grade and taking a patina like this it's hard to get it to red rust but if I start cutting citrus and things like that and leave that knife go or even three minutes we're going to start getting red rust so that's why people are into the stainless steels when you want in a stainless steel the first thing you're thrown is Chrome which is a really big molecule and just it makes for an edge it looks like an orange peel so when they want to fill in that grain structure molybdenum is a very good filler it's a very tiny molecule that fills in a lot of the gaps both Mac and this shun have a fair amount of molybdenum so we call them a LibDem knives mostly meaning that they all of these have molybdenum this one has a very small content of vanadium a very high amount of molybdenum aus-8 steel aus 10 steel a little bit tougher on this one a little bit more of an Adium then you can get into BD 10 which is a very well known Steel out of Japan it had been their super steel for a long time there's a whole family of VG twos and VG tens BD 12 this one right here is a Damascus clad one by Kikuchi now when they do the damask is cladding what they wanted to do was take a thinner piece of the expensive steel and wrap it with some softer steel and we can do it with a war comigo of the knife that you used to use for many years was wrapped one time steel it's not done to be pretty it's done to be functional so that softer steel helps to protect the edge and gives a little bit more flexibility to what is otherwise a very very stiff steel and we want flexibility not really because we're trying to use it as a fish fillet knife but because a knife gets bent and tweaks in the course of work we want it to snap back to its original shape so the softer steel helps it to do that whether you have a Damascus cladding or a single layer of cladding is really just cosmetic now this right here would be an example now need Knights will not say exactly what they use on this field it is my understanding that it would be BG 12 and I don't we I don't want to say anything that I shouldn't about me not tonight because the faculty did not tell me what they're using but what you can do on this and I wanted to use this as an example of how you can use a pure section of VG 10 or VG 12 but the amount of heat treating you have to do to this is substantially different you can this is not just heated up in water and plunge it are heated up and fire and punch it in water oil this has very rigorous heat treatment schedules you will heat up to a certain temperature bring it down and hold it at this temperature for two hours and bring it up again and one of the steps of baking it in rock salt so this goes through some significant heat treatment to where they're able to get a slab of pure VG 12 and it is not nearly as chippy or stiff as other steels of the same kind and that's why knee knock is a pretty highly prized company and also the beautiful handles you know I can sell you this with a pure buffalo horn handle and about double the price they have some cap phone handles that are colored and textured also very beautiful about 50% more that carbon fiber but the basic knife you pick the one that you like then after that the handles are vanity so after the VG Steel's then we get into powdered steel powdered steel is a different way of making a steel where they have taken the vanadium which is a hardener the molybdenum everything that they're putting into that they have heated it separately blown it through a mr and in the powder form they can stir these together and pressurize it with argon gas so in other words not going into an oven they're locking to a cancer and something's very similar to like a number-10 can and the tremendous heat pressure that generates squeezes it down into a disc they run that disc out through a series of rollers to the desired thickness and then they send that out to the knife makers an interesting thing about it they've been able to get more vanadium in this and they have in the other mixes so even though these on a rockwell hardness now you're getting you can get these 63 you can get them even higher but 63 is pretty much where they normally stop that steel is still not chippy normally when I start getting a knife over 61 I start getting reeling their wrists you touch a bone and you can get a little microchip but these have been extremely durable these guys here are Swedish steel and the Steel's the cool thing about Swedish steel is the very basic components that we're using carbon and iron the iron deposits and Sweden are extremely pure they're dragging from peat bogs 16% bauxite content would be normal when you're trying to mine iron from an area you can get up to 60% purity when you're pulling these from that area so you're starting with a pure product and the end result when they're done smelting is trying to get rid of sulfur and all the different impurities they end up with a cleaner product so that's why Swedish steel is also kind of highly prized by Japanese knife makers this an extremely thin and light these style of handles is we call our wah handles an oval wah this one is hexagonal this is not a beat or knife this one is for precision cutting one thing people have to realize about the Japanese - in their food preparation they don't hammer through bones if you've seen this guy work chef Hiro we are very precise with the way that we use a knife and cutting around when you're going through chickens and things like this we're sliding through the joints and we're not just hammering through so these knives are not good for hammering through things like that this dragon told David I see Japanese characters on this mutant so this is some the Steel's from one country and then they I guess I exported to Japan and then they finish it off correct okay what brand is this one here Kiku eating Kuching yaki queeg's are pretty distinctive with their chrysanthemum it's hard to see in this light but yeah here's the cookie collegiate chrysanthemum shape okay got it can Kiki cheese great and make no junk right over there nice very well this one right here is kind of a unique entry this is US Steel bd1 and nitrogen aide steel it was basically a hard tool steel and after doing some research on the powdered steel thing yeah I understand they did all this weird stuff they blew it through a mister and all that it still didn't explain the density of the grain structure why did this form such a nice tight grain and then he determined is the nitrogen if they were using when they're cooling off the metal blowing it through the mr. so these guys started using nitrogen on the tools field here in the United States and made an excellent steel problem with the production of the final knife all those little details the grind work that fit and finish the handle it was costing a fortune and the quality was not very good hmm so they sent these to yak so the axle is a very old well-established company that makes their own line of knives in Japan and they are making this one out of us deal Apogee is the name of the company that's making them this one we're getting very high on the rockwell hardness scale and here they're listening cps BD one end steel these fire Knights have been out here in the United States for less than a week their fire meaning they have had the knives in a little different shape they have chef knife sword a little bit fatter and a little bit more of that German belly and I had asked them to give us something a little bit more traditional shape or my style of cutting and they have done that so we have a new ten inch and 8 inch chef's knife and a slicer they made a very good slicer but it was nine and a half inches long which is great for the household it fits in a knife block but they have big handles on it for people with big hands and on the slicer I didn't have good knuckle clearance and also I like over ten inches when I'm trying to do slicing want one long draw so nine and a half inches with just a little too short so the new chef's knife down here have been great this one right here is kind of a new type of steel this one is a jin-san three the unique feature about gin-san three is that it is stainless steel but it is made the same way that they do the carbon steel knives where you have a soft steel and a hard steel folder together this is a Japanese forged knife that is made by a master who is going to be hammering the two Steel's together and putting them into the charcoal and cooling them and all those techniques it was actually something I need to learn more about because it's a unique steel and when they were trying to explain to me what they offered and we're showing me the knife I was very confused because I saw these lines and said well clearly this is a carbon knife you know noisy environment when I was trying to talk to the knife makers this particular one is made by G Co but minato-ku nay the knife line that we are working to keep the Masters and prentices together in the knife line that the hero has chosen to use that were made to his specifications they are offering to make these knives also in gin-san 3 which is very fun they price point your little high it's about 300 dollars for this knife this one is a unique shape though I was actually unaware of Mia Russia this is a cross between a debe and a Yanagi we had a gentleman coming to have his knife sharpened and I don't know how I missed this with all the Japanese knives that I've worked with and all the time I spent there I was unfamiliar with this shape not quite as thick as the standard debba and you know it's a lot easier to break down a larger fish this is actually a short one at 210 millimeters we also have them at 240 but for some customers who have asked comparing it with a regular debe here much much thicker but for some of these customers who have come to me saying look they're getting in really big tunas and they want a 240 millimeter debe this is a much better option and these are like swinging a battle-axe when they start getting to that kind of length the but my point in choosing a knife is when you're trying to make a selection steel type is important also a lot of it has to come from trusting the guy that you're buying from I can't even recommend particular brands I like Miyabi Kaizen knives we sell them they have a knife line that is available at a big store let me put it that way and it's made of an a EBL steel a e BL is steel that is famous for using it in disposable razor blades I would have purchased that knife it is a great looking piece it's in the Damascus patterning that they use the shape of the knife is great and out of the box it is extremely sharp just as a razor blade is but it will not hold an edge so we have customers down here a lot of them or bringing them in here weekly for resharpening and there's a lot of regret when they buy those so it's helpful to talk to somebody like me or talk to if you're in the restaurant industry ask your chefs what they've been using and what they're happy with because the guys who are using it eight hours a day are really going to know but each of them has its advantage and disadvantage I can promise you that if you get a set of Gustav icons in any of the Gustav any of the standard German knives in 15 years that knife is still going to look great in a home use some of the more expensive Japanese brands if somebody is not careful in how they use them then they get a lot of micro pitting and chipping and we're constantly having to grind them and fix them and they don't look so good in 15 years but for real food enthusiasts who enjoy being able to take a knife and just glide through food and have a proper motion and I just mean reasonable care reasonable care means don't take the knife and use it for something for which it was not intended you know the tip of that knife is not a screwdriver you are never if you're having to lift that knife and Hammer with it it's going to break so otherwise I think they're all very enjoyable price points should be fairly reflective of the amount of labour and quality that went into this deal there is most of the knives that we have down here are two-sided double beveled knives the monana Cooney's when we buy these this is a true single beveled knife the backside of these are hollowed out and this is what a Japanese chef will use the reason being to get the ultimate thin edge it has to be one sided it will be flat on the back and a very low ten degree angle to make a knife that is that thin if you end one sided the reason it's concave is when we set that knife down on a sharpening stone if it's hollowed on the back side then we're sure that we're getting full contact with the stone if they try and grind it flat there's always little ripples and things like this so it never really makes full contact so when you see this type of a shinobi line in this shape that is what it's designed for this is the ultimate sharpness that you're going to achieve and a knife is on a Japanese sushi knife now there are Japanese knives that are manufactured one sided matsuhiro is an example of one matsuhiro when they are making a knife some manufactures will take a v-shaped knife and put more of an edge on one side than the other that is not a one-sided knife a Masahiro knife has a right triangle shape to it so if you're left-handed you need to be a bi left-handed knife it will never track correctly but it's what we call there will be people saying it's an 80/20 it's a 70/30 exactly how much back bevel do they have when they sharpen this knife place it down on the stone and sharpen this edge as you do so the metal will curl around a little bit to the back side and that burr needs to be knocked off most of these are hand finished knives and when it come around to knock off that back bevel these guys don't break out protractors to see if it's an 80/20 edge of 70/30 feel free to do whatever you want on the back side of the knife ideally you want to get it as close to 100 zero as possible this one is mine that I've used for many years what I like to do when I'm sharpening my knife I will put a nice low angle on the front side when I'm knocking that burr off though I will come back and pretend that this is a German knife and I'll come really high even you know German knives are generally 22° I'll put that at least 25 degrees - not only knock off the back level but also to put a little bit more steel underneath the edge it's a very very small amount of back bevel on it but it is at a significant enough angle that it helps it to hold its edge for a long period of time but you know those little details we'll get into knife sharpening honneur working with Bill our main purpose today I just wanted to look at say when you're choosing a knife you choose the shape of the knife you choose the handle of the knife choose the style of the grind and then look for a metal that's going to suit your purposes the harder in the thinner means that you're going to have to be more delicate with it that's all you have a couple of things over here that I wanted to show you though okay I know you have this great thermometer that you love we sell things like oh this one's way better look at that see the size of the area though or actually take a tour of as opposed to a little dot hero my new toy do I get any new toy description so you get a new toy the other thing is it's a probe thermometer as well okay all our facts read two seconds or less okay so if anybody's ever had a thermal pin that style of thermal coupling that was patented by thermapen their patent is up so now CDN makes these things much better to monitor for what you're trying to do ago we got ours at Home Depot and I just you know we have a myriad tool so if you're ever looking for the fish scalers bonita shavers quail egg shears any of the Japanese turning slicers products and things like that we have those kinds of things okay this in here this is a present for you here oh these are machi su maki mats as we call them they come in a couple of styles that we have available here in the United States the ones that are made in China and cost a few dollars or the more expensive ones where this is like fishing lines that they're using they're like forty five dollars and then as soon as you cut that through that fishing line you either have to retie it or throw it away Wow this one is made by the rattan furniture company when they are making the best Maki suits in Japan and this is what I set out to fund who makes the very best ones say well they hand split the bamboo because when a machine them sometimes in a drying process they curl so these ones are hand-stitched I have to order them well in advance they don't make many of them but I just wanted to come to a company that was still making them the old-school way and that is the rattan furniture company still making the best monkeys in the world and illustrates the rudder to use them than you anybody is doing the most esoteric toshi roles that I have ever seen hear what you have to say to this again I'm scripted oh yeah that'll be bloomers we have teachers now while heroes got t-shirts and he's got a line of mugs and bags and hats window apron soon I saw quite neat well yeah we just he just launched that about a week ago right here oh yes your line of clothing so good yeah we should have find some pho we brought something more important something you can enjoy a Cuban rum yes it knows me well David thank you so much it's always a pure pleasure and joy for us to come by and see you and and just be educated I mean this is another language I don't speak this language but I learned a lot today you know learn a lot and a lot of our viewers out there really appreciate you and there's information down below you can contact me by email and give a give a getting a call too you know if you want to talk to them absolutely we actually answer the phones here and the staff is you know it sounds like I know an awful lot about this stuff my staff knows these things sure so only I'm not here my daughter Megan is often the first point of contact when answering the phone but amber bill Jeremy any of the people that are here right they know this product sure and of course I'm happy to answer it about it thank you again so much for your time David thank you get us on yes likewise it is on Oh show are you taking bet for your view your viewers your fans yes this is you know no Kuni want to take one out letter one see you promised a giveaway they've been selling off the shelf so luckily we were able to get a hold of three to bring back you can autograph these two here oh okay in Japanese what are you going to write on the back yeah I'm going to do the sign on the by yourself on each character and what else you're going to write mr. or konnichiwa yeah on each other yeah I'm excited I'm excited for all of your fans and viewers and thank you so much for watching hero see you in the next episode so David thank you again so much Susan thank you

Channel: Hiroyuki Terada - Diaries of a Master Sushi Chef

Views: 622,894

Rating: 4.7867246 out of 5

Keywords: nove kitchen and bar nove sushi and bar how to make sushi DIY sushi, DIY sashimi, best sushi chef in the world, Jiro dreams of sushi, gordon Ramsey, sushi, sashimi, best sushi chef in miami, master sushi chef, master chef, hiroyuki terada, hiro terada, best kitchen knife, best professional knife, japanese knives, how to choose a kitchen knife, best home kitchen knife, knife merchant, how to choose a professional knife, sharpest knives, minonokuni knives

Id: 7nTBEbMQBGQ

Length: 42min 47sec (2567 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 09 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Taramonia]

Not a bad video thanks for sharing

[u/DonNguyenKnives]

Overall pretty good. Couple things he said I can nitpick about but it's just nerd things.

[u/imonfiyar]

Just a channel I follow regularly, sometimes David from Knife Merchant does a segment and it's always interesting to watch. It starts at 1:10, just kinda random stuff at the start from previous vids