So You Wanna Buy a Knife, Huh? Part 2

Warning Signs (How Not to Buy Garbage)
Sometimes it can be a little hard to tell quality knives from knives that simply have better marketing budgets. Here are the warning signs that the knives you are looking at might be not be all that they seem:

Locale -- you generally don't find quality kitchen knives at the grocery store, the gas station, the hardware store, the sporting goods store or the bait and tackle shop. The local big box retailer is also not a place to buy good kitchen knives. Yes, they may actually have recognizable and reputable brand names, but it's not the top of the line. The margins just aren't there. Stick with a specialty kitchenware shop, cutlery store or online cutlery retailer. You can find decent knives in department stores, but the clerks don't have the knowledge or flexibility you need to get exactly what you want. You either buy their box or go home. Go home. You can do better.

Price -- Most of the time you do indeed get what you pay for. A good chef's knife generally costs somewhere between $80 and $150. Some are substantially more than that. There are some bargains out there, but for the most part a six piece set of knives (with block!) for $49.95 is no bargain. Expect to pay upwards of $400 to $500 for a good matched set of knives, if that's how you are inclined. This is a big reason I'm not a fan of boxed sets of knives. On a per-knife basis a set can be a good deal, but you also pay a hefty surcharge for knives you don't need. Most manufacturers offer a two or three piece "starter set" for this very reason.

Mystery steel -- If they won't tell you what's in the steel, they probably aren't very proud of it. There also are manufacturers who feel that you have no need for this information and would be too dumb to make use of it if you did. They don't deserve your business. At a bare minimum, you should see the words "high carbon" somewhere. That phrase is open to very flexible interpretation, but it at least means you are in the ballpark.

Weasel words -- Beware of meaningless marketing drivel, words like "surgical steel." There is no such thing. The word "stainless" all by itself without the "high carbon" modifier tends to be a bad sign, too. It sounds authentic, but low carbon stainless steel is awful. It is hard to sharpen and will not take or hold a decent working edge. It can be manufactured and sold cheaply, however, which is why a lot of people end up with knives that just make them miserable.

Flex -- fillet knives aside, a good knife blade is fairly stiff. You shouldn't be able to bend it or flex it very much. If you can, that's usually a sign of cheap, low carbon steel or a heat treatment that left the knife softer than you want in your kitchen. If the blade feels flimsy, it is.

Never needs sharpening -- Yes they do, you just don't want to. "Never needs sharpening" is the weasel term for a serrated edge, even if the maker tries strenuously to avoid calling it that. These knives are garbage. Avoid them at all costs. They are lousy performers to begin with and when they do eventually go dull they cannot easily be sharpened back to usefulness. They tend to be made with very cheap steel and depend entirely on the ripping action of the teeth to work. Might be handy in the tackle box, where corrosion resistance is more important that cutting ability, but these knives are not something worthy of your kitchen.

Country of origin -- The knife making centers of the world are (or were) justly famous for their products: Solingen in Germany, Thiers in France, Sheffield in England, and Sakai and Seki City in Japan. When you buy a kitchen knife from one of these places, you stand a pretty good chance of getting a quality knife. When those manufacturers farm the work out to another country, you're probably getting cheap steel, punched out and slapped together by the thousands to feed the gaping maw of commerce. Put another way, a knife from Solingen stands a good chance of being high quality. A knife from a Solingen-based manufacturer who has the blades stamped out in Paraguay and assembled in Bora Bora probably isn't worth a damn, even if it does have the logo of a famous brand.

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CHAD WARD is the author of An Edge in the Kitchen, available in June from Morrow Cookbooks. He has been a writer and (sometimes professional) cook for more than 20 years. His work has appeared in publications ranging from Best Food Writing to Aviation International News. He lives in North Carolina.