How To Use Every Japanese Knife | Method Mastery | Epicurious

[Music] hi i'm christine i'm the executive chef at kimika and today i'm going to show you how to use every style of japanese knife i only own japanese knives at this point and to be honest i don't actually see very many professionals using anything but japanese knives these days i'd be very surprised if you buy a japanese knife and you don't continue to want another one after you buy your first one a knife should last you a lifetime so it's important to take care of your knives like they're your best friend these are the basic tools for knife care a knife roll sharpening stones and this is a saya a wood cover made out of magnolia wood one of the first things you learned is that you would never give your knife away to anybody to sharpen you have to do it yourself make sure you soak the stones in water these are not oil stones we only sharpen japanese knives with wet stones using any kind of sharpening wheel or mechanism really just shaves off too much knife so we're going to do this western style patty here you have to always make sure you soak these for at least half an hour before you're using them this is going to be at 70 degrees you're going to go this way and then 30 degrees on this side then you're going to want to wash it off and make sure it's really dry because that water on there will eventually rust and the last thing that you you might use is a little bit of oil and the oil will protect the knife from oxidizing rusting or any of those things but these really are the tools that will allow you to care for and hopefully really welcome these knives into your your cooking family all right let's get started this knife is a kyoto when people ask me what knife you should get a kyuto 8 inch chef's knife is the place to start it's the all-purpose knife so something that we do a lot at the restaurant and we do a lot of at home is using onions so cut the ends off just a little bit off of the butt and we want to peel the onion first so we're going to cut this the knife has a nice bolster so it helps you peel the skin off of the onion you could use your hands but it's nice to use this bolster on the butt of the knife it's lighter it's thinner this doesn't feel unsafe when i'm doing this i'm really guiding it and i'm putting my hand up for a little bit further on the knife so i can really control it you don't want to use a knife that's too big that feels a little too heavy and that's where this thinner knife really makes a big difference because it's much easier for you to slice the onion thinner and at a faster pace paper thin red onions we could do a dice of the onion you can see you have this precise nice red onion dice now and that's the gyuto this is a sentoku sentoku means three virtues and the three virtues of this knife is that it can cut fish meat and vegetables it is another one of our all-purpose knives for like julienning maybe doing some potatoes and carrots everyone has carrots in their kitchen you can really use this up and down motion and really utilize the bolster that's a little bit taller and you're just doing a very up and down motion instead of a rocking motion like you would do on the kyoto another cut that's great to do with carrots is called a rangiri where you're essentially rolling just one knife cut down you roll and you keep going so these three shaped twisted cuts if you're not super skilled in your knife skills this is a great knife to start using it's a little bit more compact and it works really well at home because obviously your kitchen is a lot smaller than the kitchen i have at work it's the perfect night for new york apartment if you've got the little tiny cutting board that's about this big perfect just for that size and that's the sentoku this is a kiritsuke a knife that is traditionally only used by the executive chef the ultimate example of japanese knife making craftsmanship and this comes from the tradition of samurai sword making so this is my kitchen sword so today we're going to use this single sided beveled knife and we're going to slice this tomato and it just cuts through like nothing and it really falls off the beveled side of the knife and it's multi-purpose so i can work on some vegetable cutting and perhaps a piece of fish for you and a piece of meat that's the kiritsuke this is a bunker it is also an all-purpose knife and it's very delicate for instance we're going to cut some japanese eggplant here it's so delicate and thin and light i can really just slice through these things very quickly the bunka has got this slanted tip and this is why sometimes you'll pick to use this knife versus like a nakiri so as you can see we've cut this eggplant in half and we're just going to use this and not go all the way through but we're just scoring putting the tip in maybe like a quarter inch a half an inch down and doing these cross hatch marks and this will allow the eggplant to cook faster and you'll get this really beautiful design we also can do that with mushrooms like these king oyster mushrooms here it just slices through it so quickly and then here you're going to do the same scoring and you can put these in a hot pan some oil maybe finish with a little butter get this one side super golden brown and think about it at a dinner party how cool would this be for you to have a bunch of these on a platter people be very impressed it's not too long it's so light and maneuverable it's a really nice knife to be able to just kind of slide right in and that's the bunka this is a petty knife petty meaning petite in french generally speaking they're five to six inches long and it's really great for cutting smaller vegetables or herbs or small fruits and any kind of detailed work that you want to do for instance i'll show you here it's really awesome for peeling garlic so if you notice here again you've got the blade that goes all the way down to the heel so you can use the heel to help you peel some of the skins off and really use the heel here to get between the skin and the garlic and we've got our nice piece of garlic and so if we want to do some sliced garlic so let's say we're making some linguine clams at home and you can slice your garlic and then you're going to mince it it's small it's light it's handy it's perfect another thing that would be great for is for using shallots so for some fine detail work here if you want to do thinly sliced shallots this is the perfect knife to do that and there you have it some nice brunoise shallot and this is your petty knife this is a paring knife the smallest of the knives that you'll find a beautifully handcrafted japanese knife hard japanese steel wood handle i use it most for cleaning small things like these beautiful small radishes i got i really use a lot of it in my hand like this so we can clean off the tails and clean off the tops you can use it for making sure if there's like a little dirt here i don't actually like to peel any of my vegetables i try not to do that at all i try to scrub them so you're really utilizing the whole vegetable and there's no waste another application that i use a paring knife for a lot is mushrooms like these beautiful chanterelles from canada so here i'm just gonna cut the butt off and then very delicately i'm gonna scrape a fine layer of the chanterelle off and that's really what paring knives are for is for the very delicate work that you're going to have and that's the paring knife this is a nakiri a nakiri is a square vegetable cleaver it's great for cutting open squash potatoes and things like that because these hand-hammered dimples here are called tsuchime and the purpose of them is not only is it very beautiful but when you're cutting these hard vegetables it allows it to not get stuck on the side of the blade the balance of it is great for putting weight down on these harder skin vegetables we're going to cut this squash open we've got this kabocha here you really need a knife with a little bit more weight to it to get through the hard skin it's so easy here do it with one hand i can do it with hands like this it's great we've got this beautiful purple sweet potato just cut right through we want to make some sweet potato fries get the next one you see how the potato just falls right off of that edge it's because we've got these dimples here we could do a few simple knife cuts and it's also great this square blade the larger surface allows you to move things around a bit faster and that's the nikiri this is an usb which translates to thin slice it is a single edged vegetable knife and it is really used for high level japanese decorative knife work for example i'm going to show you this cut that we do for the cucumbers that you see in sushi rolls it's a great knife for it because of the single edge it's got the blade all the way to the heel so then you're controlling the knife and turning through the cucumber and just rolling and doing thin slices of cucumber rolling until you get all the way down to the core it can take a lifetime to master these knife cuts and then we've got to the core and we can then use it to finish the julienning and again there's no rocking it's just a straight down motion up and down to get a nice even julienne here and these are your little thin strands of cucumbers that you see in sushi rolls this is your usual this is a devil it is a single beveled japanese knife with a thicker spine used for fish butchery and meat butchery and it has a lot of weight to it so you can crack through some of the bones this is a nice one and a half pound branzino and we're gonna use kitchen shears to cut through the fins here on the fish then next we're going to cut the head off so here the weight of the dab is really important you can literally just cut all the way through see ahead so now we're going to take the rest of this and we're going to take the fillets off and it's super sharp so you're going to be able to get through very smoothly fish is very delicate and can tear very easily so it's very important to have a super sharp knife and because it's angle beveled it will slide right down the backbone of the fish very easily so here we've hit the backbone what we do here is we cut through the bones here in the belly and then we'll take them off after let me go all the way through so you've got one fillet here and then we'll do the other side and just ride all the way down the fish until you hit the backbone and you just cut through the rib cage and you've got your second fillet here now we're going to clean up the rest of the fillet here you've got the rib bones that we've cut through with the debba so you're just going to want to take the edge of the knife and get underneath these bones and it goes through the skin very easily as well and there you go this step here is a six and a half inch deva they do come in different sizes i've used one that's 10 inches long it really depends on what type of fish you're butchering so obviously this branzino is on the smaller side so we have one of the smaller devos and that's the deva this is a yanagi yanagi translates to willow leaf it is a long thin single edge knife you can use it for slicing sashimi or crudo's or any smoked salmons or any smoked fish like that you can really see the lineage here of the samurai sword making it is long and thin so you're using the knife and the length of the blade to do very long cuts so you're again not tearing the fish at all and it slides very nicely off of the single beveled edge so here we're going to clean up this salmon this wild king salmon that we have here a bit and then we're going to do a few slices of sashimi you can also use the yanagi to help skin the fish and really utilize these long tears that it has it's really these long strokes that you're doing with the yanagi so here we have the belly that we're going to make a few sashimi slices from it still has a skin on it so we're going to take the skin off using the yanagi this shinagi is 10 and a half inches and they do come in different sizes so again with the larger fish and the more skilled you are the longer a unagi you'll be able to handle and we want to use this very sharp single edge knife so we're not going to tear the fish and it's really just smoothly gliding through this salmon belly it's also very important to wipe off your knife in between slices because then it will decrease any friction that you'll have when you're slicing and it keeps everything neat so here we're just going to slice this piece off these long slicing motions is what is important here for the sashimi and you really use the whole blade starting from the bottom and moving all the way to the top and it's almost just gliding with it it's one nice solid stroke almost like using a sword this is the yanagi this is a cocky mookie kaki is oyster in japanese and this is the japanese oyster knife the japanese oyster knife has a much sharper point than the western style oyster knives and it's very sleek and very simple functionality it's got a wood handle and it fits perfectly in your hand and honestly very little curvature it's pretty much this very sharp piece of metal in this very simplistic piece of wood the handle is a little bit thicker than the western and french style and oyster knives as well and it really gives you a little bit more leverage and ability to control the knife a bit more so you see this very very sharp knife here we're just going to use this point and try and get that into the hinge of the oyster get that popping sound that means you've been able to get the oyster open and then you want to take the knife you can use the sharp part to cut the muscle and then you've got your oyster you can also use this flat part here to help scrape and detach the bottom muscle of the oyster from the shell and then use it to flip the oyster over and there you have your perfect summertime oyster on the half shell and that's your kakamooki this is a tsujihiki tsujihiki translates to pulling the muscle so this is a japanese meat slicer the angle that the tsujihiki is generally sharpened to is a bit steeper so you get really thin cuts with this it is designed after european style but it is thinner and is made out of a harder steel so it retains its edge even longer an edge is super important when you're slicing cooked meat because you don't want to tear the delicious steak that you're about to eat we have here a dry aged ribeye we're going to slice off the gristle which is the fattier more marbled part of the ribeye and then we have the other side and this is the eye of the rib eye so this is the part where we need the knife to be super sharp so it's like you can slice the meat almost paper thin again like any fish these long slices and it's just one long motion and which is why the length of the tsujihiki is important you're not rocking back and forth so you're just doing one straight motion almost like a sword going through the beef the knife really has to fit well in your hand because you're really using very little motions just one long turn generally speaking when you're using your slicer for the first time you probably want a shorter one because you don't want a blade that's too long that you can't control it i love the super sharp edge because as you can see it's really just slicing through these beautiful clean cuts of the steak there's no tears and we've already had a really good solid crust from the sear and the length of the blade is long so it's easy to pick up the other pieces and move it to a plate and there is your beautifully sliced rib eye you can use a tsujihiki also for fish i actually really like using a tsujihiki to cut scallions because right here the height of the tsujihiki is a little shorter and i can get really paper thin slices of scallions and that's the tsujihiki this is a honeski honeski is a japanese boning knife it is different from a european cell building knife than that it is got a triangle here and a tip in the front and it's got very little flex honeski is the knife of choice when you break down a chicken so here i'll show you how to use the honeski we're going to take the tail off first it is sharp enough that you can just cut right through the bone and then we'll take the wings off and it cuts right through the joints and the weight of the handle helps you have more leverage pushing down just cuts right through the tip you can get into smaller places or it can help you puncture the skin without tearing the meat also the angle of this blade and the weight of the handle really allows you to kind of push this direction so you're kind of pushing the weight against you working the knife in a different direction you don't see very often and we're pushing through the skin and then now we're going to use the tip to get through that hip joint and that oyster and then you can just kind of pull the rest of the chicken off so we do the same on the other side using the tip pointing it down pulling this away and using the weight of the knife and the heavier handle to really use it against gravity you can use the tip here to get in between the joint to cut the cartilage and you've got your legs using the tip again we're going to take the drumstick joint here and on this side as well and really pinpointing where that joint is and getting the blade right in the in between it gizzard so now i'm going to continue to use this heel of the knife again european style knives would not bony knives would not have this triangular shape or even a heel that you can do this with so we really use this edge to kind of get through some joints on specific parts of this chicken as we debone this thing this is a pretty cool technique that i learned when i was learning how to make yakitori in a very different style of what we call airline chicken breasts but i'm going to use this heel and go all the way up this way it's very uncommon to cut things away from you you normally cut things towards you but this technique i learned from a yakitori master so we're going to go all the way up [Music] we're going to use the tip to kind of cut this little piece of silver skin and pull this off and you've got your airline chicken breast here here what we have left is america's favorite part of the chicken the chicken tender just think about it one order of chicken tenders how many chickens does it take to make one of chicken tenders again we're going to use the heel of the honeski trim this little piece of fat off and go all the way up the rib cage flip this over use the tip here to separate it from the shoulder and we can just pull this off and we've got your second airline chicken breast and then we're going to use the tip to get underneath the chicken tender to release it from the rib cage and pull that through there's your other tender so right now we can make an order of two tenders you can take the shoulder blade off here which actually is probably one of my favorite skewers and you just have to break this joint [Music] get your shoulder so it's like a nice moist piece of white meat we've got chicken tenders you've got your breasts you've got your legs and your thighs i mean here you can separate it again just using the weight of the knife and just getting through the joints you've got your drumstick here you get your chicken thigh here and there's your chicken and that's the haneski this is a honkotsu this is really made for taking meat that's on the bone whether it's the whole animal or primal cuts so if you have like hanging meats you're really kind of carving the parts of the animal that you want out what's really unique about this knife is that it again there's no flex to it at all and the shape if you look at it here there's no heel on this knife at all which is great for cleaning let's say membrane off of the meat so it doesn't get snagged on the heel but this is really the only japanese knife that doesn't have a heel we're not gonna do a whole pig today but we've got a whole bone in pork shoulder and i'm gonna show you how to use the honkotsu to break down this pork so here we are going through some of the natural muscles of the pork we're really using the tip to help us guide and break through the different muscles within the shoulder with the lack of a heel i'm not getting caught on anything i can get really close to the muscles that i'm trying to identify and to the next to the bone so here i'm carving around this big bone of the pork shoulder and really allowing the tip to kind of be the guide for where i'm going to pull the knife to right it's it's thicker and heavier so you you're not afraid of like chipping the tip or ruining the tip let's say on a like a petty knife where it's a little bit softer and a bit more delicate but you're able to really get close to the meat and really carve out where you need to go and then it's a real extension of your hand and it's thin and small so you can maneuver at different angles as well so you can follow the curvature of the bones and then here i just need to carve out this area so i'm really going to use the tip to kind of like draw and cut out this little last piece of bone you can really get underneath the bone here there's no resistance at all you're just using the knife to guide you to where the natural break of the bone is and then the tip just kind of just separates the pieces of muscle and cartilage from the bone so we've got this piece over here so we've got the bone out it's also really thin so again like here we have this little piece of skin left we wanted to take that off and like i was saying to you before it's very good for cleaning meat so at times like let's say you get a steak and sometimes it's just a little bit more fat you can use this tip to just go right underneath and cut it off so you don't have to do some kind of weird angling or anything like that this knife is designed to be breaking down whole pigs and hanging meats so we could use this one knife to break down an entire pig and that's the honkotsu and that's how you use every style of japanese knife we may not have used every style of japanese knife but you get the idea

Channel: Epicurious

Views: 1,720,876

Rating: 4.9159074 out of 5

Keywords: method mastery, epicurious method mastery, japanese knife, japanese knives, every japanese knife, japanese kitchen knife, japanese kitchen knives, traditional japanese knife, gyutou knife, santoku knife, kiritsuke knife, bunka knife, nakiri knife, usuba knife, deba knife, yanagi knife, kakimuki knife, sujihiki knife, honesuki knife, hanktosu knife, christine lau, japanese knife expert, knife expert, expensive knife, sharpest knife, epicurious

Id: FDNNG9doFe4

Length: 24min 14sec (1454 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Mushu_Pork]

Nice to see that Takamura, and a Makoto... couple of lasers right there.

I splurged and bought myself a basic honesuki from JKI, it's so pleasing to use on chicken.

[u/Rib-I]

Never let someone else sharpen your knife? Man, I disagree. I can get mine pretty sharp as an amateur, but I've got a guy who has all the equipment and for 5 bucks a knife he makes them screaming sharp for me once per year.

[u/BlackHeartedWarlock]

This honestly wasn't a bad video they're was misinformation riddled through out, but overall was good on most of the points. There's much worse videos.

[u/cultureStress]

This video has some random mistakes in it, but it's worth watching for the honesuki technique alone. She's good at explaining what she's doing with it and is clearly really good at Yakitori chicken butchery

[u/switchfooter]

This is just... not a good video. A lot of small bits of misinformation in here.

[u/MyNamesNotTaylor]

During the Yanagi demonstration, she talks about how the length of the blade gives you long continuous cuts, and then when she’s skinning the fish with it she uses a small portion of the blade near the heel and saws it. Is this typical? I’m not very knowledgeable about sushi or cleaning larger fish, I just assumed from what she was saying she would skin it with a long slice.

[u/[deleted]]

Bad ass chef. Would be happy to learn from her.

[u/Templar_Gus]

Epicurious owned by Conde Nast. Skip.

[u/Aromir19]

Ok so I keep hearing conflicting things on this. I plan on getting my hands on a 70:30 knife. Do I sharpen it to 70 degrees on one side and 30? Because I’ve heard people say that’s a myth. Can someone who really knows what they’re talking about explain to me precisely how I’d go about sharpening a knife like that, no nonsense?