A well-equipped kitchen is above all a kitchen where you can find all the cooking equipment you need to cook like a real chef. Of course, this also includes high-performance kitchen knives for all your food cuts! A top chef without top-quality professional knives is like a general practitioner without a good stethoscope. To prepare all your fresh foods including fruit, vegetables, meat or fish, you must have knives adapted to their different cuts.
It is sometimes difficult to choose essential kitchen tools. We don’t want to waste money for cooking tools that we never use. Here, you will find a selection of the best knives that you absolutely must have in your kitchen !
Paring Knife
This kind of small knife is useful for delicate tasks and small jobs in the kitchen like peeling fruits, trimming fruits and veggies, removing the stalk from strawberries or beans, slicing garlic and so onWith its sharp and short blade (about 3 ½ inches long), this is a great useful tool for any food that require attention to detail. Thanks to the paring knife, you’ll be able to slice and mince small foodstuffs.
A good-quality paring knife is not that expensive. Prefer using a metal blade rather than a ceramic knife for a longer lifespan. We recommand the low-priced Victorinox Swiss Classic paring knives to get started in the kitchen, or nitrum stainless steel blade paring knives from the professional Arcos brand for a better cutting performance.
Chef’s knife
We love the chef’s knife because it is definitely the most versatile knife that exists. Used for slicing, dicing, mincing and chopping vegetables, meats and fish, this long blade ( 8 to 9 inches) knife is the ultimate everyday knife. Top chefs usually do almost 90% of their tasks in the kitchen thanks to this go-to knife. A classic chef’s knife is defitely the best efficient item in your knives set.
If you want to spend wisely, chef’s knives are definitely a worthy investment cause good ones can last forever. Choose a full-tang knife rather than a half-tang model, it will be sturdier. We really recommand to choose forged chef’s knives made of a single piece of forged stainless steel for a better lifespan. Santoku chef’s knives ( the ultimate japanese chef’s knives that have a slightly different shape) are also good alternatives to replace the common chef’s knives.
A long serrated bread knife
Another knife you need to include in your basic knife kit is definitely the sharp bread knife (also called serrated knife) with its long and serrated blade. It will help you tu slice fresh bread or layer cakes without squashing but also some fruits such as tomatoes, pineapples, watermelons, citrus fruits and even roughly chopping chocolate. Their average lenght blade is around 15cm to 25cm (6” to 10”). Bottom line : Use it with a sawing motion and think beyond bread, it will help you to slice a lot of food with a « waxy » surface. Pay also attention to the size of the teeth while choosing it : they should be not too big and not too small.
Boning knife
The boning knife has a very flexible and sometimes curved blade, it allows it to work perfectly around bones slicing off meat as well as slice through joints and cartilage. Thanks to its sharp point and narrow blade, is also very useful to remove the skin, fat or sinews from a piece of meat. This type of knife is definitely needed when you want to prepare meat, poultry or even some fish. They range in size from 12cm to 17cm (5” to 6½”).
Fillet knife
For skinning and filleting fish, the special fillet knife or filleting knife is the perfect tool for fish lovers. Its thin, flexible, supple blade helps you working around small bones and slice through fish flesh easily, remove the bones and skin with ease. A filleting Knife’s blade range around 15cm to 28cm (6” to 11”).
Other recommandations for a better equipped kitchen : Honing Steel and Knife Block
When we talk about kitchen knives, we should not forget the honing steel, which is an essential kitchen tool to keep your knives at their peak of sharpeness all the time. It realigns the fibers (or the teeth) of the blade, gives it a sharper edge and leads to an efficient clean cut. Remember it should be use on non-serrated blades such as paring knife or chef’s knife.
To build a great knife arsenal without spending too much, choose a knife block in the fisrt place is sometimes a good alternative. Indeed, purchasing many chef knives can ve really expensive. That is why starting with a good knife block is a good way to start a collection for day-to-day cookery.
Knife sets and blocks includes most of the time 4 or 5 knives such as a slicing knife, a chef’s knife, a bread knife, a parin g knife, a steak knife and a pair of kitchen shears. It can also be sold with a sharpening steel. The block will help you keep your knives organized and free up space in your kitchen drawers.