Why are most of us so woefully uninformed about our kitchen knives? We are intimidated by our knives when they are sharp, annoyed by them when they are dull, and quietly ashamed that we don’t know how to use them with any competence. For a species that has been using knives for nearly as long as we have been walking upright, that’s a serious problem. An Edge in the Kitchen is the solution – an intelligent and delightful debunking of the mysteries of kitchen knives, once and for all. If you can stack blocks you can cut restaurant quality diced vegetables. If you can fold a paper airplane you can sharpen your knives better than many professionals. If you are willing to be a little adventurous you can find modern kitchen knives that outperform anything ever produced
Veteran cook Chad Ward provides an in-depth guide the most important tool in the kitchen, including choosing the best kitchen knives in your price range, practical tutorials on knife skills, a step-by-step section on sharpening, and more-all illustrated with beautiful photographs throughout. Along the way you will discover what a cow sword is, and why you might want one; why chefs are abandoning their heavy German knives in droves; and why the Claw and the Pinch, strange as they may sound, are in fact the best way to make precision vegetable cuts with speed and style.
An Edge in the Kitchen is the one-and-only guide to the most important tool in the kitchen.
Chad Ward has been a writer and cook for more than 20 years. To date, nearly 400,000 people have taken Chad’s online knife sharpening class on eGullet.org. His writing has been published in publications ranging from Best Food Writing to Aviation International News. He lives in North Carolina.
