Part 2 of So You Wanna Buy a Knife is up at Leite’s Culinaria. Todays lesson: 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:
David Leite has been kind enough (or desperate enough) to invite me to do a couple of guest pieces for his blog on Leite’s Culinaria.
Today’s entry, “So Ya Wanna Buy a Knife”
You have decided that it is time to get serious, time to show the world that you have arrived and are ready to cook. You have decided to buy some decent kitchen knives.
For those who haven’t yet been introduced, Leite’s Culinaria is food writer David Leite’s multiple Beard Award winning website featuring articles, insights, reviews and recipes. As one writer put it,
“Edited by David Leite, [Leite's Culinaria] is kind of The Atlantic Monthly for food lovers, with well-written essays by Leite or one of his posse of fellow food-obsessed wordsmiths. There are always recipes that are begging to be tried, columns that are both funny and informative, product reviews, interviews…basically hours of enjoyment to delve into.”
Michael Ruhlman, author of The Elements of Cooking, has a short bit on his favorite kitchen gear. I like the way he thinks. We all have too much crap in our kitchens. I do agree with many of the comments, though. I would have a hard time getting along without my tongs.
Why write a book about kitchen knives? Because kitchen knives changed the world. Because they are the oldest and most important tool known to humankind. As Michael Symon wrote in A History of Cooks and Cooking, “The use of knives does not depend on culture, it is culture.” If you include our pre-human ancestors, we have been using kitchen knives for about two and a half million years. That’s a million years before fire became fashionable, just to put things into perspective. From those first crude stone edges to the sleek, ultramodern hardware lining the walls of your local kitchen emporium, knives allow us to perform the most basic human task - preparing and sharing food.
Two and a half million years ago Homo habilis (”handy man”) first started chipping crude stone tools, including cutting edges. These tools played a significant role in the massive evolutionary changes that quickly followed. The ability to butcher and share scavenged meat, much richer in calories and nutrients than a strictly plant-based diet, led to rapid brain development, interdependent communal living and improved communication skills. By the time the recognizably human Homo erectus hit the scene, they came equipped with big brains, advanced tools and the small teeth that indicate a diet based on pre-processed, i.e. cut up, food. Puts your chef’s knife in a new light, doesn’t it?
Knives are the cooks’ oldest tool, the most essential, the most trusted. Their whole purpose is sharing. Michael Symons, A History of Cooks and Cooking
excerpted from the Introduction to”An Edge in the Kitchen”