What Should I Carry in My Knife Bag?

So you're starting out as a Cook, and you haven't taken enough courses at Cash Cow Culinary Academy to be "given" a knife kit. Or maybe you're a Line Cook trying to go deeper into the craft. You need a better knife, and they aren't cheap. So, what knives will help you the most and make a big difference at work?

The Mystery Set. . . except that one in the middle.

Well, let's explore what it is you'll be doing at your job, shall we?

The Beef

The Beef

I've written before about the challenges that come with tackling large-scale projects for Bailey's Restaurants. Our Commissary staff produces massive quantities of food to be portioned and finished at each of our 7 restaurants. We butcher 3-6 whole pigs weekly for making pulled pork, sausages and other goodies. We cook at least 1,000 pounds of bacon a week. We produce a hundred-plus recipes for use all over the company. In the last few months we have brought Whole Steers into our wheelhouse.

Robot Rehab

Operator Error

(The most common cause of equipment failure.)

The flat blade to our Robot Coupe dicer looked like it had been used to chop gravel. Getting a new one would take a week. . . There's 40# of fresh salsa to be made, a bucket of mirepoix to be chopped, and it's Thursday evening, Chef!

How to Carve the Toughest Winter Vegetables

It has happened to all cooks: 

We are tempted to do something we KNOW is dangerous, but we really WANT to do it anyway. Take this beautiful hard winter Golden Nugget squash:

Its skin is like armor. It's going to be SO GOOD, if I can just get the blessed thing apart! And so we end up going at this spheroid with our knife while it rolls unpredictably, berserk, causing us to nearly lose a finger.


Well, no more of that for my readers! Here's a series of knife techniques that will allow you to apply big forces safely to bust into the treasures of tough winter vegetables.  No Rutabaga is too mighty to withstand these methods!

Success! 40,000+

Yes! 

Good Skills, Good Tools, Good Attention 

Make wild ideas possible.

Here's the proof:

The spoonful of peppercorns is resting in a bed of carrot micro-dice, accomplished with the formidable Shun Edo Santoku.  Watch the event unfold by clicking this video link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwzELYaMAD0

(OK, so the dice could be more uniform in shape.  I will do better next time in the name of chef-perfectionists! It's not easy to manipulate damp carrot threads into even stacks.)

Here is the raw material.  That's 4 ounces.

Here are some images of this alien micro-landscape. (All Photos by Zoe Eon Fink)

First I cut the carrot into slices.

Then into little threads.

Then into dice. (Grains of Kosher Salt at right to show scale.)

That's more than 40,000 pieces.
Which means each one weighs approximately 1/10,000th of an ounce.

YES!! Thanks to all who helped on this project. NAMASTE!

The 40,000: What If?

40,000

That's a big number (in some contexts.)

What if it were the answer to the following question:

Into how many pieces can a person cut a carrot?

This Person:

This Knife:

This Carrot:

(OK.  Haven't chosen the Carrot yet. . .)

Sounds like an action film, right?!
It's a no-holds-barred real-life man-versus-nature contest happening in my kitchen tomorrow.  Video to follow.  Just you wait and see!

Wounded Beauty: DIY Dent Rehab

Cake Artist "TT" needed big help with a knife.  I answered the call.

Bad juju emanated from the dented blade.  "Ex-roommate," she explained.  "Can it be fixed without grinding off half the blade?"

"I'll try," I said.

The Pleasure of Work: 200 Times Over

When you love what you do, you find reasons to work more!  That's not crazy, really.

I didn't really have to cut the veggies into brunoise (tiny dice) for this Chicken and Rice I made for my pre-schoolers. . . but I wanted to use my knife and my skills.

Wounded Beauty: the Backbone

Wounded Beauty part 2

What I have heard for years about Shun knives is: they cut true. I am in a position to agree. But why do they perform so well? Any knife geek can tell you that a good edge makes a good tool.  But it's the backbone and handle of the Edo knife that elevate it in my experience.  

Wounded Beauty

Have you ever had to care for something that needed your help, but that scared you to even touch it? 

Back in 2001, in Minneapolis, a woman sat down on the retaining wall in front of my apartment building sobbing.  I had never seen her before.  No one from my neighborhood, she was clearly hurting and had no place to go with it but the public sidewalk.  I was coming down the stairs to get on my bicycle, and I felt moved to do something.  Or rather, I became rooted in place, unable to walk past her and go about my business.  I sat down on the wall a few feet from her, gathered up my courage, trying to think of a response to her unknown grief.  Eventually, I moved closer to her, said hello, and put my hand on hers where it rested on the stone.  She looked at me, apologetically, ashamed maybe of being in such a state.  It was hard to look at each other, but she gripped my hand and then it was easy to just say reassuring things. 

"You're not alone.  You can survive.  Do you have somewhere to sleep?  Do you have anyone to talk to?"
She nodded, couldn't speak yet but nodded clearly.  After a few minutes, we had one more mutual hand-squeeze and I got up, unlocked my bike, and went to work.


What reminded me of that encounter was the weird thrill of a situation that arose last week.  Luckily, in this case, the wounded beauty that came to me was merely a knife.

On the Knife's Edge

Knives are the signature tool of the cook.  One uses them to cleave the good from the bad, to sculpt the amorphous, to get to the heart of an ingredient.

In the world of professional cooks there are those who become knife-obsessed and carry around a twenty pound toolbox from station to station, choosing a new knife for each task.  Then there are those who have seemed to transcend this attachment, and these cooks work with rented knives that arrive sharp every week, are made of inferior metal and lose their edge no matter what you do.  These cooks nevertheless coax excellent work out of these hatchets, because they have a level of skill that surmounts the obstacle.

I work for a cook in the latter category, a thirty-year veteran who was mentored by Hubert Keller and worked in various amazing kitchens with some brilliant and edgy characters.  So I have struggled along with his preferred rented hatchets for years, keeping two knives of my own in reserve for special projects and emergencies.  And then, after working alongside one of the toolbox-toting nuts for awhile, I began to bring out my own knives more often.

(For those who are curious,  my two knives are Wusthof-made, which means German steel from the city of Solingen, where knives have been forged for centuries and the craft is quite elevated.  One is a 10 inch extra-wide chef's knife I bought reconditioned years ago, and the other is an 8 inch filet knife I received as a gift from my wife.)

Here's the hatchet and my Wusthof side by side:

Here's what I've been noticing.  Hatchets have a LOT of drag, which means they are impeded from cutting smoothly by the coarse texture of the steel and the wide angle of their edge.  They are also thick-bladed all the way to the where the edge is ground, to ensure they will have plenty of metal on them after a hundred confrontations with the water-cooled high speed grinding wheel that our knife company uses to sharpen them.  (A very cool device that will put a new edge on a knife after one pass in and out of the slot - i.e. two seconds.)  By contrast, my chef's knife is tapered as it approaches the edge, so the knife is wedge-shaped and much thinner overall. And the Wusthof steel has a visible grain which runs the width of the blade, and for this reason glides through a potato or beef filet with less drag.  That's my theory anyway.

Compare the edges - see where the hatchet has literally "been through the mill."

But the real value in using my own knife is that I have to confront its condition everyday.  If you pick up one of the four hatchets we have at work, and the edge has been blunted because of hard use (i.e. can opening) you throw it down and pick another one.  If my knife is dullish, I have to steel it, and keep steeling it, or grind a new edge using the medieval technology of the whetstone.  The stone takes skill and practice, so it's frustrating the first few times you use it because your technique is lousy and so is the resulting edge.  But about six weeks ago I got an edge on with a great "bite"- the kind that will cut ripe tomatoes cleanly, and I'd been keeping it up well, slicing chicken breasts into seven even layers night after night.

Then the lobsters arrived.

Removing the meat from a poached lobster involves a lot of blade abuse.   We cut into the claw shell (one of the thickest and hardest parts) with the edge of the knife to create a fracture one can exploit to shatter the rest of the claw and get at that wonderful lobe of muscle inside.  We also cut through the tail lengthwise and the knife has to cleave both parts of the shell and be sharp enough to divide the meat inside without tearing it.  I almost chickened out and took a hatchet for the project, but then decided to just commit to some quality time with the stone after I got finished with the lobsters.

Eight lobsters - eight tails, sixteen claws, and sixteen sets of knuckles (the upper "arm") which sometimes can't be cut apart with scissors and need to be chopped through.  Sure enough, our good set of scissors was AWOL.

Suffice to say the knife did the job with relative grace - the density of that thin blade is handy when chopping down into the claw - you can really feel the momentum build as you swing your wrist.  After the cutting board was littered with shell shards and misc goop (albumen) from the project, I had a neat pile of clean lobster meat ready to enjoy, and after cleaning up I put my knife to the steel to see if I could coax it back into form.

Amazingly, it seemed unharmed.  I was chopping chives with it a few minutes later and doing a very clean job.

A hatchet would never have done that.

So here's to German steel, which is damn hard stuff.

And I'm starting to see that one arrives at the point of no-attachment to the tool being used after mastering the tool and its care.  After building the confidence to handle the consequences, your skills replace the tool, become the tool.

One of the things my boss can do is make a wonderful rolled omelet.  One of his long-time customers saw him filling in at a poolside kitchen station at a country club where he was the Executive Chef.  They asked if he could make them an omelet and he tried to dissuade them saying "I don't have a burner to use at this station, or of course I would make you one."  The customer said: "I know you.  You can make an omelet with a cigarette lighter and a pie tin" or something to that effect.

You get the idea.


P.S. I thought sharp was sharp until my wife brought home a Japanese knife that's ground only on one side - so the edge is half as broad as a western knife.  People swear these knives greatly improve the cut one can make on delicate things like raw tuna.  I've always been skeptical.  This summer, I cut up a few dozen peaches with this thing, and it does actually cut more cleanly and straight than I thought possible.

Always learning something. . .

What's your favorite knife?