paulraphael

Kai is a huge company with many lines of knives, including ones like Shun and Wasabi which are designed and marketed for export for Western consumers. These knives are designed to have market appeal, and to survive in the hands of people who are untrained. The Shuns use good steel, but have a fat, performance-killing edge geometry, so they don't compare with the professional knives that they pretend to be. The Wasabi knives have similar geometry, and crappy steel. I'd agree that they're still good for the money, but I wouldn't put them in the top one thousand in a thread that's about the best brand of knife available in 2011.

Well, there you go. Last I looked you could get their entry level 240mm gyuto for $60 something. I would still generally look to a knife that's made for professional use rather than a brand like Kai, wich is export only, made for the Western consumer market. If you check out the knife discussions at foodieforums.com you'll get more up to date information than what I have. Mean time the Fujiwara carbon steel knives remain a good value, direct from Japan http://japanesechefsknife.com/FKHSeries.html Unfortunately a lot of the bargains from a couple of years ago are now priced over $100.

I don't care about seeing through the metal. What's to see? Professional ovens almost never have windows. I just want something that doesn't need to be babied. Stan, you don't think thin aluminum would warp? Self-clean happens around 900°F. Aluminum has a pretty high rate of thermal expansion and melts a bit over 1200F.

A few years ago Tojiro was the bang-for-the-buck champion, no doubt. At least compared with everything else available in the U.S.. Word got out, though, and the price went up. I think it's more than just the exchange rate. The Tojiros are now thinner than they used to be, and are more nicely finished. And they have a reputation. So other brands, like Togiharu, have become the value champions. This seems like an ongoing cycle. In another year everyone will be talking about some brand we haven't heard of yet.

Years ago I shattered the inner glass on the my oven door. I never fixed it because the oven works fine, and I know I'd probably just break the replacement glass the next time I make bread or dribble something. But it probably effects the oven's efficiency. I'm considering replacing the glass with a piece of sheet metal. Something fashioned from an aluminum full sheet pan would probably be easiest. Would aluminum survive the oven's self clean cycle, or would it warp terribly? What about stainless steel?

The reason you got such a colossal range of answers is that you didn't define "best." It's kind of like asking "what's the best wine?" or "what's the best house?" Best in terms of pure performance? If you are willing to spend several months praciticing Japanese cutting techniques and hand sharpening, then you may actually be interested in a very thin, high performance Japanese knife. If you're looking for a durable workhorse than can take an accepable edge and keep going with minimal maintenance, then you'll be well served by a Forschner or Wusthoff or Messermeister (the knives that get used in most mid-range restaurant kitchens). If your answer falls somewhere in between, then there are hundreds of knives, mostly Japanese, that fall somewhere in between. If you find yourself leaning toward the high performance end of things, I'd suggest starting slowly ... get an inexpensive one, like one of the very thin-bladed, budget carbon steel gyutos, and use it for learning. You won't freak out every time you chip the blade or make a sharpening mistake. And when you're ready to upgrade, you'll have a better idea of what you want.

It's not a question of need, but of efficiency, quality of cuts, and edge longevity. If you have a chance to use a good knife that's sharpened at 2K vs 10k you can feel the difference and decide for yourself it's worth it. One reason for polishing is that with very low bevel angles, coarsely sharpened edges will have exremely long, thin "teeth," which are unsupported and which crumple easily. This isn't a big issue with a 15° or higher bevel angle, but when the edge starts getting thin it makes a difference. Scalpels aren't good analogues for kitchen knives. For one thing, surgeons replace their blades after just a few inches of cutting. For another, they get a lot of their performance just from their sub-milimeter thickness. A well sharpened knife will actually have a sharper edge than a scalpel (at least than those generic blades) but it will never cut as well because it has to be several milimeters thick behind the edge.

At those prices you can bet it's a grinding service. Those are great for house knives and beaters but you really don't want to send a high end knife to a service like that. It will be ruined.

I don't think I made my point clearly. Knives with softer steels can be sharpened to whatever level of polish you like, but there's no advantage in going past a medium coarseness (2K or so) because the fnish won't last more than a few minutes of cutting. The toothier kind of edge you get at 1K or 2K has proven serviceable and durable on softer knives, and is easy to maintain with a steel. Even when such an edge dulls, it's capable or cutting because the toothiness of the edge stays agressive and works like serrations. When a polished edge dulls it just loses its ability to cut. So polished edges work best on higher end knife stieels that have greater edge stability. I hadn't said anything about geometry, but of course that's an issue also. Softer steels need to be sharpened with fatter bevel angles or they'll crumple. Standard for German knives is around 22° on a side, although if you're willing to be careful you can go a couple of degrees lower than this. On Japanese stlye knives, depending on the steel and the skills of the person using the knife, you can go from 15° all the way down to 7° or so, and also sharpen with radical assymetry. A knife sharpened like this will cut like a straight razor, but will require the cook to adopt Japanese cutting techniques. It's all a question of which tradeoffs you're willing to make.

I'm not saying that 0.5 microns isn't fine enough—it's plenty. The issue that you don't get any benefit at all when you jump straight to that from a 2000 grit belt. You're getting a 2000 grit finish. And sure, this is "good enough," for most purposes, and as good as makes sense on softer knives. My whole point is that if you're dealing with higher end knives, this approach isn't going to get you near their potential. I don't think it makes sense to spend a lot of money on high end knife if you're not going to sharpen it beyond what you can do with a more pedestrian knife.

6 Micron is slightly finer than a 2000 grit waterstone. It's a medium grit, suitable as a final grit for a European knife. To get the best performance from a harder knife, you need to go at least to 4000 grit; preferably 8000 or higher. The jump from 6 microns to 0.5 microns is much too large. You're not accomplishing anything with that, except maybe reducing any lingering burr or wire edge. The risk with leather isn't rounded bevels but a rounded edge.

An issue with leather is that it's compressible, so it becomes challenging to produce a flat bevel without any rounding of the edge. I suspect that someone with middling sharpening skills (like me) can do about as well with leather as with a finishing stone, but that a skilled sharpener will do better on stones. The sharpest knives I've ever used were produced without any stropping, by friends who are very skilled. The bigger issue: what succession of belts do you use to lead up to the leather strop belt? Do sander belts come in fine grits (like above 4000)? A 0.5 micron abrassive is useful as a polish after an 8000 to 10000 grit stone or paper. It can't remove the deeper scratches of anything coarser. I'd ask Dave Martell at Japanese Knive Sharpening. He's got reasons for using the belt sander for softer knives and for reparis, and stones for the higher end knives. If he could get the best results on a belt sander, he'd have no reason not to.

If you know what you're doing, a belt sander is great for major repairs and for sharpening stouter, softer European knives. I wouldn't recommend them for the thinner or harder Japanese knives. You're not going to get the kind of edge that's possible on waterstones. Any properly formed edge will shave your forearm. The difference between an edge made at 600 grit vs. 8000 grit will mostly show itself in the quality of cuts in the most delicate foods (fish, herbs, fruits that brown, etc...).

Awesome! Thanks. His website also has a lot of the technique information in a nicely distilled format.

It depends. Some motors are rated for peak power, others for continuous power. A motor rated for 1hp peak will overheat and burn out if it's asked to produce that power more than briefly. Consumer appliances are typically rated with peak power numbers, but in the case of KA, even that's just deception; they're using peak power consumption, which does not correlate in any definite way with power output. Hobart doesn't mess around. The 3/4 horsepower mixer is rated at 9.5 amps current draw at 120 volts. This translates to 1140 watts, which according to Kitchenaid style dishonesty, would equal 1.5 horsepower. Hobart's much lower horsepower rating is due to the inefficiencies inherent in any motor and mechanical device. I don't know if it's typical to see the output power that's 50% of input power, but based on what I've read about motors it seems reasonable. And if it isn't obvious from the pictures and capacity ratings, that 3/4hp Hobart has room in its bowl for three or four Williams Sonoma Kitchenaid mixers, and could whip them into a nice fluffy mousse in about a minute. Also to be clear: I'm not knocking the KA mixers. I have a pro 600 that has served me well for many years. I'm just annoyed by the company's deceptive marketing practices, and think they need to be spanked.

You have it about right. 746 watts equals one horsepower. 1000 watts equals 1.34 horsepower. It still amounts to a lie. Wattage is can be used to measure power consumption or output power. Horsepower is ONLY used to measure output power. Until this ridiculous move by KA, I've never seen an appliance company try to fool people by measuring power consumption in horses. KA and the other should do what the commercial manufacturers do, which is give the actual, sustained horsepower output. For a mixer like this, it would probably be about 1/10 hp. Which is plenty. A Hobart N50, which has a form factor closer to an atom bomb, is rated at 1/6 hp.

It's nice to see a horsepower measurement instead of a wattage measurement; horsepower generally means actual output power while wattage means power consumption. Unfortunately, Kitchen Aid is lying. Just ridiculously so, and I hope someone takes them to task on it. For reference, here's what a 3/4 (real) horsepower mixer looks like. This particular KA mixer may in fact be a good mixer, even a great one. But for obvious reasons I wouldn't trust KA's marketing to tell me so. I'd wait until some people can put it to the test. You can always buy from W.S., knowing that their warranty is forever, but you pay a huge premium buying there. I'm more inclined to wait things out, let the thing get field tested, and buy a KA factory refurb. The pro 600 is a plenty good mixer assuming you use it intelligently, and assuming you don't get a lemon. The artisans are good for cakes and light duty use but have a poor track record with breads.

Knives don't stay sharp for 20 years; they stay sharp for 20 minutes. A good knife will stay sharp enough for several hours of hard use.

One of the reasons for the variety of responses is that people have different ideas of what sharp means. Very few western-trained chefs had any idea of what a sharp knife was before they started mingling with their Japanese-trained brethren. If you use a European style chef's knife and maintain it on a steel, you're accustomed to a very versatile and efficient tool that does a huge range of tasks reasonablly well—but it is not a sharp knife. Not by a long shot. It simply can't be. Five minutes with Japanese knife that's been thinned to an accute bevel angle, and sharpened on water stones to high polish, will demonstrate the radical difference a sharp blade makes. Like all good things, it comes with tradeoffs. Such a knife requires a much more delicate set of techniques, and a refined set of sharpening skills. And you gotta sharpen it fairly often. If you do prep at a restaurant, you'll be able to go a whole shift without touching it up, but you'll have to hit the stones for a few minutes each night. You'll also need a different knife for working around bones, chopping chocolate, rock-chopping woody herbs, hacking into hard cheese, etc. etc.. For serious sharpness, the only choices are waterstones, or other abrasives like wet/dry sandpaper mounted on glass or something similar (the sandpaper method is a pain). Waterstones can be used freehand, or with the assistance of a system like edge-pro. The edge pro takes the manual skill out of it, but gives less flexibility and is slower. No matter what you do, if you want a very sharp knife, it will require practice and maintenance.

Sounds to me like recipes are the least of your worry. As far as I know they are not protected as intellectual property. The precise wording of a recipe can by copyrighted, but that's worth nothing. You can sell the whole thing and still use your recipes. All the other things people are mentioning are more important.

There's no need for alcohol. The dry ice is added directly to the ice cream base. It evaporates as the ice cream freezes. A small percentage of the C02 goes into solution in the water in the base, carbonating it, where it will stick around for several hours, gradually diminishing. There are other ways to use dry ice that won't carbonate the ice cream, but I don't see the point. There are much easier and more economical ways to make ice cream. Keep in mind that while dry ice is very cold, it does not have an especially high specific heat. The cooling potential for a pound of dry ice may actually be less than the cooling potential of a pound of water ice, in terms of the number of calories it can remove. It's probably much less compared with the fluid that's in ice cream machine canisters. So you will need lots of it.

That's the way to do it. I don't move the knife at all. The paring knife is very sharp, and I can just turn the berry against it like wood on a lathe. You should get a cone shaped section from the top of the berry, and the cuts should be glossy smooth. It's a very fast process ... a couple of seconds per berry.

The killer property of dry is that it will carbonate your ice cream. Think about the possibilities ... I've come up with a champagne sorbet that's actually bubbly. The catch is that the carbonation dissipates. Unless you have some kind of pressurized ice cream carton (I don't) it will keep it's bubbles for 24 hours at most, and the fizz will dissipate steadily from the moment it's frozen. Best to crush the dry ice in a blender or food processor before using. The procedure is the same as LN2, but you're working with a solid.

Lollol, that's kinda how the real shelling machines work. I've seen em demoed at restaurant conventions. They look kinda like upright washers. You dump in a whole cube of shell eggs. Let er rip. Liquid eggs come out of the spigot into your bucket. The busted up shells are retained in the drum for you to empty. Yeah, seriously, it may be lazy but it also sounds smart. What's wrong with this?

I wouldn't spend a lot of money on steak knives. They're in the business of taking abuse: people cut directly on porcelain plates with them. And if you want to use a dishwasher, there's really no way for an expensive knife to be reasonable. One route is serrated knives. They tear up the meat, but are maintenance free. They'll last a bunch of years of occasional use, and then you can consider them disposable. Another route is something easy to sharpen. I haven't used the Forschners, but considering their other knives, they're probably great. Cheap, nice (especially with the wood handles, but really keep these out of the dishwasher or they'll crack), and generally a breeze to sharpen.