Japanese chef’s knives

The Masamoto VG-10 Gyutou, 8.2 “

Eastern knives are different from Western.  Most fundamentally, Japanese knives are harder steel, thinner, designed for a specific hand (right or left, not both!), and keep an edge longer.  The down-side is that they are more brittle, harder to sharpen, and are designed for very specific tasks so that you need more of them.  This is because the Japanese food culture calls for slicing food without crushing it.  In the West, we’re more likely to have a favorite knife with which we hack away at everything!

Recently, the Gyutou knife has become more popular in the West.  The big three Japanese knife companies (Masamoto, Misono, and Masahiro) all have a version of this knife, which approximates the Western Chef’s Knife.  The Gyutou is thicker than the traditional Japanese knife, and the blade is curved like a chef’s knife instead of straight (for rocking instead of for slicing).  I don’t know how much they’ll catch on in Japan, but I’m certainly finding them interesting.

Image: Japanese-Knife

Post from: Cooking Gadgets

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