Your Expert Guide to Knives, Sharpening & Kitchen Blades in the UK
A Japanese nakiri knife is a rectangular, double-bevelled vegetable knife with a flat edge and a blunt tip, built for straight up-and-down cuts that meet the board along the entire blade. Its name translates roughly as “knife for cutting greens”, and as this overview of the nakiri bōchō explains, it has long been a home-kitchen … Read more
Here’s the dirty secret of the knife world: you don’t need to spend £200 to feel what a Japanese blade can do. A well-chosen affordable Japanese santoku knife glides through an onion with a whispering, effortless slice that makes your old supermarket block look faintly embarrassing. That’s the promise. The catch? The market is a … Read more
What is a Japanese chef’s knife? A Japanese chef’s knife is a thin, light, hard-steel all-rounder, usually a gyuto (literally beef knife), built for precise slicing, dicing and chopping. Compared with a Western blade it tends to have a flatter profile, a finer edge and harder steel, so it glides where heavier knives wedge. Here’s … Read more
Here is a small kitchen heartbreak that plays out in British homes every week. Someone spends a Sunday rolling maki, reaches for the bread knife, and watches a lovely salmon fillet turn into a shredded mess. The fish isn’t the problem. The blade is. A proper VG-10 steel knife for sushi fixes that, and it … Read more
A VG-10 steel chef’s knife is a kitchen blade built around a core of Japanese high-carbon stainless steel, developed by Takefu Special Steel. It contains roughly 1% carbon and 15% chromium, and it is typically hardened to about 60-61 HRC. That combination gives you a keener edge than most Western stainless, without the rust drama … Read more
What is a Damascus steel knife block set? It is a matched collection of kitchen knives whose blades carry a rippled, water-like pattern from layered steel, sold with a wooden, bamboo or magnetic block for storage. On modern kitchen knives, that pattern usually comes from a hard core steel wrapped in softer layered cladding. That … Read more
Stand in front of any decent kitchen shop display and you’ll notice the same thing happening every time: hands go straight for the blade with the swirling, water-like pattern down the steel. That’s the pull of a damascus steel chef’s knife, and it’s not just about looks. Underneath that pattern sits a genuinely different way … Read more
A Damascus knife set is a collection of kitchen knives — typically a chef’s knife, santoku, paring knife and often more — forged or clad from multiple layers of steel, producing both a distinctive wavy or swirling surface pattern and, when done properly, a harder, longer-lasting edge than a single sheet of ordinary stainless steel. … Read more
There’s a particular kind of kitchen despair that comes from sawing at a tomato with a blade that gave up its edge sometime around 2019. You press harder, the tomato collapses into a juicy mess, and you wonder why chopping vegetables suddenly feels like a wrestling match. A ceramic knife set exists precisely to end … Read more
Picture a blade that glides through a ripe tomato as if the skin were a polite suggestion. It never rusts, it never leaves a metallic whiff on an onion, and it feels featherlight in your hand. That’s the sales pitch for a ceramic chef’s knife. Most of it holds up, provided you read the small … Read more