— Mark Rappaport

Okey doke. Um, I'm gonna first, uh, address some of the terminology that's used just for, for everybody in the audience here. Hopefully it'll offer a little bit of clarification. Uh, a San Toku, uh, is historically and traditionally, you know, different from a chef's knife per se, so I want to tease these apart a little bit. Uh, although I understand that, uh, language changes over time, and it may well be that today since more and more people are using a San Toku style knife, uh, including some chefs that, some people might call it a chef's knife. But let me tease those apart a little bit. The, the, the San Toku is a, a Japanese style, uh, blade. Um, it's got a, a very shallow curve on the blade, the, the top kind of curves down in, toward the blade. Um, and it's a fairly all purpose knife. Um, they tend to have a, a light gauge blade. So if you look at the blade from the top, it's fairly thin, uh, which makes it really nice for less dense items. So, most, uh, plant ingredients, uh, the exception, you know, could be, at least in my experience, uh, things like dense, uh, winter squash, uh, in which case it could be helpful, uh, to have a heavier gauge blade. Um, I have, uh, seen blades chip, uh, when used on very hard and dense items. So do be aware of that. Now, if we shift our attention to what's called a chef's knife, that comes from the European tradition. And, you know, most of these, uh, or at least originally, uh, again, in my experience, they came from the European knife makers like Woff and Henkel, uh, and, you know, others, uh, from Germany and France, and yeah, they have a, a blade that curves a little bit up toward the end. That top is mostly flat, and you get this nice rocking motion, you know, as you move across the, the cutting board, whenever that, uh, sort of, uh, you know, movement is gonna be needed. Um, so again, I just wanna start out by kind of teasing those apart, uh, because in my mind, uh, there are two different styles of knife, okay? But let's just, we'll focus on the San Toku since Mark is mentioning that, um, first anyway. Um, so five inch, uh, blade, that means the cutting blade is five inches long, about this long. And then you've got the, the handle, which is probably gonna be another, you know, five inches or so long. So, uh, let me also add that the selection of a knife is a very personal topic, uh, or at least I think it should be. And ideally, you would go down to some sort of a cutlery store, or, you know, a Williams Sonoma, sort of a kitchen place, uh, that has a cutlery section to give you a chance to, to hold these things, and to even pull out a cutting board the size that you would use at home to get an idea of what that looks like and what it feels like. Okay? Keep in mind that the size of your blade is gonna be directly correlated with the amount of food that you can prep. You can prep in a given amount of time. The longer the blade, the more real estate is gonna cover on your cutting board. The more food you can chop, and the more you can prep in a given amount of time. Um, so if you are prepping a relatively larger amount of food, then you're gonna use a larger blade. Uh, if it's gonna be a smaller quantity of food, then a smaller blade will be acceptable. Uh, this is why very often in restaurants where the prep volumes are relatively larger when compared to home cooking, you'll see, uh, cooks and chefs using, you know, maybe an eight inch blade as the smallest blade. Uh, and, and it'll, it'll go up from there at, at, you know, eight or 10 is pretty common. Anything bigger than that becomes less usual. Anything less than an eight inches, a little bit, uh, less usual in a professional setting, uh, at home, you know, if you've got a, uh, what's the size you have about a 13 by 18 inch cutting board. Uh, you know, uh, a eight inch chefs knife is about the biggest, or an eight inch blade is about the biggest that you're gonna comfortably use before the blade starts to overhang the edges of the cutting board. It becomes inconvenient. If you have a larger board, then great, you know, you can cover more, again, more real estate, more ground with a larger blade without bumping into things or running out of cutting board. Uh, your decision can also depend on the size of your hand. Um, although, um, I'll, I'll also add a caveat by saying that I've seen plenty of, um, you know, uh, professional cooks with smaller hands that just get used to right using a larger knife because you need to, uh, in a high volume setting. But a lot of folks that have smaller hands, uh, are just more comfortable using a shorter knife to start with and at home. Again, that's perfectly acceptable. So, you know, I'll say that, uh, you know, at home, what comes to mind for me, and, uh, you know, what I use off, you know, I, I think interchangeably would be knives with a blade length of six to eight inches. Most commonly, I would consider five inches to be a little bit short. Um, but again, if you can get these knives in your hand to give it a try, uh, that would be best. And at some of these cutlery stores, you can even bring some, some food product into practice cutting, uh, to get a real feel for the knife. So that would be my recommendation, if that's possible. Um, if I had to just make a, a sort of a shoot from the hip, uh, recommendation for home cooking, I would say the Santo is a great choice. A chef's knife, uh, can work well. In other words, the European Chef's knife, the Santo is a great choice. And something in the six to seven inch, you know, uppers of eight inches, you know, would be, uh, a good choice, uh, as well. Uh, but again, um, you know, if you're getting, uh, into this anew and you have, let's say, smaller quantities to prep, then maybe, you know, six or seven inches would be, uh, quite adequate. All right. I hope that gives you a few points to think about and, uh, yeah, have fun in the selection process.