Wyatt asked last week if he could use "the real knife." He meant my chef's knife, the 8-inch Victorinox with the black handle that lives in the top drawer, and he asked the way he'll ask to drive the van someday. He turned eleven this month. I told him we'd talk about it, which is what I say when the answer is "yes, but not today."
That knife and I go back to 2011, my first year in catering. I've cooked with a lot of knives since I was eighteen, and these days I own exactly four, plus a whetstone and a honing steel. Three of them get used every day.
Where they came from
At the Tex-Mex restaurant in Denton where I started, the knives belonged to the kitchen. They were fine on Monday and dull by Friday, and nobody owned the job of sharpening them. When I moved to the catering company in Dallas, the lead prep cook told me on my first day that I'd want my own. "You're going to cut forty pounds of onions a week," she said. "Don't do it with somebody else's knife." I bought the Victorinox Fibrox 8-inch chef's knife that week for about $40. The same knife runs about $55 now.
Two Victorinox paring knives came a little later, about $10 for the pair. The Mercer serrated bread knife was $20, bought after I'd sawed through one too many wedding loaves with the wrong blade. The 1000/6000 whetstone was $30. The honing steel came from that catering kitchen when they replaced theirs, so I can't tell you what it cost, only that I asked first.
The one I use most
The chef's knife, by a mile. I'd guess it does 90 percent of the cutting in this house. In a normal week it goes through six or seven onions, a few pounds of peppers, chicken thighs, a pork shoulder, a head of cabbage, a bag of potatoes and whatever jalapeños the backyard plants are giving us. The Sunday reset is mostly this knife and a big cutting board.
Why this one? It's light, the blade is thin, and the textured plastic handle doesn't get slippery when my hands are wet or greasy, which in a kitchen is always. It isn't pretty. The handle has faded in spots, and the blade is stamped rather than forged, so it flexes a little and won't hold an edge as long as a much pricier knife would. It also comes back fast on the stone. For the way I cook, that's a trade I'd make again.
The paring knife hulls strawberries, cores tomatoes, seeds jalapeños (gloves on, always) and slices apples for lunchboxes. The second paring knife is the backup, which mostly means it's the one somebody put in the dishwasher. The bread knife cuts bread, of course, but it also splits a whole tray of Hawaiian rolls for sliders in one pass, slices summer tomatoes without squashing them, and levels birthday cake layers.
Keeping them sharp
- Hone almost every time. Six or eight light strokes per side on the steel before I start. Honing doesn't take off metal. It just straightens the edge back out, and it's most of what keeps a knife feeling sharp day to day.
- Sharpen every six to eight weeks. Sunday afternoon at the kitchen table, stone on a damp towel so it can't slide. The 1000 side first, about ten minutes for the chef's knife, holding the same angle stroke after stroke. Then a few minutes on the 6000 side to polish. I test it on an old grocery receipt, because of course I do. A sharp knife glides through it. A dull one folds it.
- Hand wash, dry right away, never the dishwasher. The heat and rattling dull the edge and wreck handles.
- Store them safely. Plastic blade guards, in the drawer on the far side of the kitchen from Rosie's learning tower. A line cook would laugh at the blade guards. A line cook doesn't have a two-year-old.
And the honest one. Two weeks ago I used the chef's knife to pry apart two frozen chicken thighs that had stuck together, and I snapped about an eighth of an inch off the tip. I knew better. I did it anyway because the butter knife was in the dishwasher. It took twenty minutes on the coarse side of the stone to grind a new point, and my knife is now very slightly shorter than it was in 2011, which seems like a fair tax on being lazy.
What I don't own
No knife block, no 12-piece set, no cleaver. Somebody gave us a ceramic knife years ago, and it chipped the first time it met a sweet potato. That's not a verdict on anybody else's kitchen. It's just that four knives and a stone have handled everything I've cooked for fifteen years, from wedding prep for 300 to Eli's cheese quesadillas.
Yesterday I gave Wyatt the paring knife, a cutting board and a pint of strawberries, and showed him the claw: fingertips tucked under, knuckles guiding the blade. He hulled the whole pint without a nick and asked again about the chef's knife. Sixth grade, I told him. He wrote it on the paper plan under August.
