paulraphael

Even heat distribution is pretty easy with any conductive material. It's hard to do better than 1/4" thick aluminum. Copper allows excellent heat distribution AND fast response to temperature change. It's unique in its ability to do both so well. Acording to the guys at Cooking Issues, it's pretty piss poor: http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/02/16/heavy-metal-the-science-of-cast-iron-cooking/ As far as using stainless on induction, there are stainless steels that work, like the magnetic alloys used on the outside of All Clad pans and the equivalent. I don't know what the advantage would be in the case of a disk on a copper pan. The copper isn't remotely stainless, so I'd be most interested in a material's efficiency at tapping the induction energy.

I forgot an important request ... something that would be a fundamental innovation: some kind of thin carbon steel disk on the bottom of the pan, so it would work on induction. It would take some engineering to figure out a thickness that would give good enough induction performance without wrecking the responsiveness of the pan on conventional burners. But I bet it could be done. Ok, I'd want pans of varying thicknesses for different purposes. Bottoms can be thicker than the sides in most cases. Smaller saucepans can be thinner (2.25mm or so) on the bottoms for responsiveness; larger pans like saute pans, which need to distribute heat farther and retain heat can be thick (3.0 + mm). I'm making up numbers ... an engineer working with serious cooks could pin this down better. Since you're plating and not using the pre-made laminated material, you should be able to make pans with varying thicknesses like this. Definitely not brass for the handles ... to conductive. A cast stainless handle, that's easy to grab with or without a side towel, and that's solid but no so massive that it takes forever to cool down, would be ideal. Tradtitional iron also seems to work fine. I'd also want the selection of pans to be limited to (or at least focus on) pans that make sense for expensive copper. There is no reason besides being a sculpture collector for having a copper stock pot. Saucepans (including a sloped or curve-sided range) are most important. Frying and sauté pans are also nice. A copper rondeau is a great luxury (i don't have one, but if I ever find myself weighed down with currency ... )

I have marble countertops in my kitchen now, and consider it close to the worst material I've ever used. The patterns make it hard to know if the surfaces are clean; they scratch; they are not acid resistant; they can stain; they're so hard that it doesn't take much of a bump to chip glasses and plates. I'm hoping natural stone in general is a fad that will soon pass. Among all the natural stone options, marble has got to be the least practical. There are two plusses that I can think of: it's a good surface for rolling dough, and you can set hot pans on it. I'm hoping I misread the line about chopping in the previous post on marble ...

That's amazing. I'm going to pass that off as my grandma's secret recipe.

Stainless comes in a few different grades; the heavier ones are solid (and quite a bit more expenive than the light ones). You can keep them looking decent by cleaning with an abrasive in the direction of the original brush marks. It won't look new, but it will look ok. I think the biggest argument against stainless is esthetic ... it looks commercial in a way some people don't care for. I've had my eyes on more than a few used work tables, as Steve suggests. I'm always thwarted by the ordeal of getting the things home. The most interesting materials I've seen are modern lab countertop materials. There are at least a couple of companies that are retrofitting the materials for kitchens. My guess is that they're expensive, but cheaper than natural stone. They are essential indestructible, with the exception that they can be scratched (but scratches can be polished out). I posted a link to a couple of manufacturers on an earlier kitchen counter thread. I was hoping to find someone with 1st hand experience (I still don't know anyone).

J.Stevens is talking about traditional single-bevel knives like yanagis and usubas. I didn't even think of these in the context of this thread, but yeah, don't go near them with a steel. They all have extremely accute bevels and you'll just shred the edge. I used the term "japanese style knives" but in reference to double bevel knives like gyutos and sujihikis. These are knives western chefs call "japanese style" (to distinguish from European knives) but that Japanese chefs call "western style" (to distinguish from traditional Japanese blades). The labels are are annoying.

That's a great question, and one that you'll get more than one answer to. There's an orthodoxy that says "never steel a japanese style knife." And there are many cooks who do it with impunity. In my experience, you can maintain some japanese knives on a steel. If the the steel isn't too brittle and / or the edge angles aren't too accute, it will work, although you should use really light pressure, and very smooth steel in general. I can't give any guidelines on where the line is, as far as how thin / how hard. My old hiromoto as gyuto handled a steel fine, until i thinned the edge past a certain point. then i just used a strop or stones for maintenance. my current gyuoto I wouldn't let near a steel.

I know that's the conventional wisdom, but I don't think typical european stainless steel is actually easy to sharpen. It's fast to abrade down because of its lower hardness, but it has a kind of springiness / gumminess that makes it more challenging to deburr than many other stainless steels (and virtually all carbon steels). It can be frustrating to produce a high quality edge. The mystery steel that Global uses is a worse nightmare in this department. Dave Martell at Japanese Knife Sharpening said that he won't bother sharpening either European knives or globals on stones for this reason ... they just get whacked on the belt sander! The euro steel does maintain easily on a honing steel, which may be it's best selling point. More significantly, sharpening the euro steels feels different enough that it doesn't provide great practice for sharpening the Japanese steels. At least in my limited experience.

Learning to sharpen is a pain, but it doesn't take long to get competent. And basic competence will give you pretty impressive edges. In my experience, developing sharpening skills and cutting skills go hand in hand, so I generally push people toward starting out with a knife that's relatively inexpensive, easy to sharpen, and easy to sell. You won't be nervous about experimenting with it. And when you're ready to get a different knife someday, you'll have a better idea of what you really want. But I'm not so convinced of the utility of learning to sharpen on european stainless knives. The steel they typically use is actually quite difficult to sharpen well, and responds quite a bit differently than the steels used in japanese knives (and their equivalents). The edgepro is probably a good way to learn. You can also get a couple of starter stones and a video by Dave Martell, Korin, or Murray Carter. I've seen the korin video (it's decent), and heard great things about Dave's (dave is at japaneseknifesharpening.com)

I can't agree. Every claim I've seen of a knife that stayed sharp forever could be traced to a knife that was never sharp in the first place. A little perspective: if your standard for sharp is the knife's edge out of the box, then you haven't used a sharp knife. Very few knives have decent edges when they're new. Often the higher end knives barely have an edge on them at all; the makers know the users want to take care of this part. Low end knives made of cheap steel won't even take or hold a sharp edge, so it doesn't matter. The part I do agree with: abuse will dull a blade in no time. But regular use will dull a blade pretty quickly too, and without regular maintenance there won't be much difference between a high end gyuto and a lawnmower blade. Guys I know who use high end knives professionally spend a few minutes on the waterstones every day. This translates to a touch up once or twice a month for a typical home cook.

Certainly ... and you're pointing out that my "ferrari" analogy was a bit too glib. I suspect if you owned a ferrari and a station wagon, you'd end up driving the station wagon over 90% of the time. I own a very thin chefs knife and a heavy one, and I find myself using the thin one well over 90% of the time. So my sense of specialization, in one sense, is reversed. It's not a piece of jewelry. I pay close attention to it, but don't baby it in many of the ways Dakki suggests. It's covered with scratch marks from sharpening. I take it out of the house all the time. At a stage at a restaurant, I let other cooks use it. Someone, being 'helpful,' threw it into a box. Everyone lived to tell about it! On another note, Prawncrackers mentions cleavers, which are a whole other world. I can't comment on specifics since I'm not a cleaver guy, but there are plenty of cooks who use a good Chinese cleaver for almost everything you'd use a chef's knife for, and these guys are seriously hard to keep up with. Worth checking out some videos or some skilled chinese cooks if you're curious.

I want to reiterate that if you buy a knife with a decent reputation among cooks / knife nuts, you can sell it for most of what you paid. So in the world of ebay and specialized online classifieds, you don't have too much to lose. In all likeliness you'll go through a few knives before settling on your baby whether this is the plan or not ... Also, for clarity ... the super thin gyutos tend to be of medium hardness. The stainless ones are mostly in the Rockwell C 59-61 range. The carbon versions are generally a point or two higher. They're not typically brittle or difficult to sharpen. And I wouldn't recommend them to everyone. I do recommend trying them out if given a chance ... it's eye opening.

True, true. I don't have experience with these but know a couple of guys who'd never let go of their carbon sabs. On the other hand I haven't heard much good about the stainless ones. Keep in mind there's no trademark on the Sabatier name ... several companies use it. Best to get advice from a french knife nerd before picking one.

I get your point, Dakki. I'm just not sure if this phenomenon will express itself in a cyclical way, as it does in some other arenas. For one, the Thesis in this case is one that is being adopted (or even noticed) by only a tiny minority of cooks, at least in Western kitchens. In a sense the thin knife thing is the antithesis; the thesis is the thick, european style knife. Even in high end kitchens, people I see seem more married to their habits (and the old thesis) than to the idea of adopting new paradigms. I recently had the chance to cook in a Michelin 3-star kitchen. All the knives there were Japanese and expensive, but there was only one other guy besides me using a thin gyuto and Japanese-esq techniques. I get the sense that this is changing, but slowly, and only in a fairly elite environment. My point being that the thin Thesis only seems to appeal to a small (and seemingly slowly growing) group. And it's appealing to this group for mostly pragmatic reasons (not cultural / ideological reasons as with the small farm and slow foods movement). If another antithesis is going to take over sometime in the future, it had better be one that offers significant tangible benefits. And from where I'm sitting, I don't know what that antithesis would be. I just don't believe that the people who have learned to appreciate the thinner knives will go back to thicker ones as a matter of course. Of course, as in all things speculative, I could easily be wrong.

A lot of what a fragile knife requires just constitutes good habits with any knife ... all knives are fragile, and one of the reasons most people's knives are so dull is that they don't accomodated this. However, a knife with a very thin edge has some special requirements. One is avoiding bones and other hard / tough foods that could grab or chip the edge, dense foods like chocolate and hard cheese that force you to push hard, anything frozen, etc. etc... Mostly they require adopting techniques that are both enabled and required by the thin edge. This means cutting with a very light touch. Guiding the knife through the food instead of pushing it. Working with mostly light and static contact with the cutting board. With a sharp, thin blade, you don't have to force. You don't have to trap and sheer the food between blade and board. The blade passes through. You can be crazy fast and still have a light touch. And the minimal board contact means the edge lasts for a long time. As an example, last fall I cooked at a 24 hour long underground event. Mountains of prep, all on nasty commercial poly boards. The other cooks I worked with were steeling their knives every fifteen minutes or so. I didn't have touch up my edge the entire time. By the end of the night I'd lost some performance but could still push cut herbs without bruising them. The blade was sharper than any blade that had been maintained on a steel. Another thing I appreciate: I don't have one of those knife finger callouses. If I had to prep all day 6 days a week, I might wreck my back, but I'd never be holding the knife hard enough for my hands to get calloused or tired.

Sure, I think we're in complete agreement on that. There's always a compromise ... it comes both with what knife you choose and how you choose to sharpen it. And different people are going to lean further in the direction of performance or further in the direction of versatility ... there's no doubt about it. And moods and fashions may change. I'm skeptical, though, that we're seeing a trend that will inspire a major pendulum swing one way or the other. I think the thin knife phenomenon has come about because people have discovered these knives (which have only recently had any accessibility on these shores). The pros I know who are using the Suisins and Tadatsunas simply say they're able to work faster and better than they ever have before. The price they pay ... having to grab a different knife if they need to lop the head off of a sea bass ... isn't so high. There are certainly people who will be seduced by the hype, try a thin knife, and not like it. But these cases don't represent a trend. The idea of a single, super versatile, indestructible knife to do it all actually appeals to me. I miss something about needing nothing but my 8" Schaaf chef. And I still love that knife. But when it comes to knocking out a bunch of prep, doing it fast, clean and fun, i have a hard time imagining going back to a using an axe. My techniques have changed in response to the thin blade, my whole theory of cutting. I don't feel any motivation to go back to the old ways. There are cases where I wouldn't want a thin knife. I cooked at a friend's drunken barbeque last night. I didn't want to have to babysit the gyuto. But I also didn't need it! A few months ago i considered doing a stage at a brooklyn pizza restaurant. Partly because I didn't want to babysit, and partly because i didn't want to feel like a douchebag, I decided that I'd get a $50 togiharu if I did that gig. But at home, or at a higher end kitchen? Don't take my thin gyuto away!

Two thoughts ... First, the technology isn't making the knives more fragile ... It's just allowing the knives to be thinner without giving up too much strength. If steels improve, the knives will be thinner but just as durable as today's knives. The final compromise between sturdiness and performance always lies with the end user. I could put a low angle bevel on my Tadatsuna if I wanted, and have a knife that could take a fair amount of abuse. But that would be a little like putting off road tires on a ferrari. For that level of performance I would have done better to buy a cheaper knife. Second, I haven't seen any developments in new steels that are aimed at improving edge stability beyond the steels currently used in the thin knives. The super steels often have incredible wear resistance, but they cannot support edges as thin as white steel or even ginsanko. The current edge stability champion among stainless steels may be AEB-L, which is a 100+ year old forumula. Ginsanko / VG-1 / 19c27 are close behind it and offer some other advantages. D2 is a high wear resistance tool steel. It has larger carbides than any of the steels I mentioned and can't support edges as thin. The resistance to wear actually offers few advantages in cutting food (unless you're agressively rock chopping on a poly cutting board), but as you said, you will definitely notice it when trying to sharpen the stuff!

Well, the limits have essentially been reached. It's why the high end thin knives made by companies like Suisin and Tadatsuna and Mizuno are basically clones of each other. They've picked the best alloy they know how to work with and are machining the thinnest blades they can. Then the cooks who buy them then thin edges as much as they can get away with. We won't see thinner unless someone finds an alloy with better edge stability than white steel or ginsanko / vg-1 / 19c27. Maybe Devin Thomas's custom gyuto made out of AEB-L will set a new standard ... we'll have to see. Not sure if there will be a backlash. These knives just outperform anything else. When people who own them hanker for a heavier knife they just grab one. The European knives definitely offer versatility. One honkin' knife to do it all. And practically indestructible. The trouble is that the performance just isn't there. If you learn to use and sharpen one of the higher end J-knives, you'll just cut better. Better results, better efficiency. It's kind of addictive. I still love my 8" german knife for anything that I fear would damage the J-knife, or if anyone comes over and wants to help in the kitchen. It beheads fish, quarters chickens, chops chocolate, and rock-chops woody herbs like rosemary. And can handle any other task in a pinch.

The trouble with a trial is that you're not going to learn the real important stuff, like what the knife is like to sharpen, what kind of edge geometry it can handle, and how long it holds an edge. The way to go about this is to buy a knife that has a good reputation, use it for a month or two or however long it takes to make up your mind, and sell it if you don't like it. You'll probably get 3/4 or so what you paid for it. Another option is to buy a used knife ... check classifieds at knife forums or foodieforums. if you do that you'll probably start out with a well sharpened knife, which is a big time saver. and you'll be able to sell for about what you paid.

Due to that alone I would say back off that 300mm knife. Yeah, 300mm is enormous. I know some people with knives this size, but no one who uses them as a main chef's knife. With decent skills and a reasonable board size 270mm is a great mix of capacity and useability. You can use a 270mm knife on a 12 x 12 board, but you're going to be spending a lot of time on board and counter management. You will need a lot of free counter space around the board for prep containers and for the knife tip to have breathing room ... and if you have that, it would be worth considering a bigger board. As far as which knife, the hiromotos are excellent. The blazens probably perform a little better by virtue of their thinner blades. But the blazens aren't the great deal they were once upon a time. Every year or two prices go up and a new wave of price / performance leaders come onto the scene. Togiharu and Sakai Takayuki Grand Chef have been getting a lot attention these days. I'd also check with the guys in the more knife-centric forums for current advice. Keep in mind your general preference as far as blade thickness / weight. A lot of guys (myself included) have been moving to anemically thin, high performance blades. But these require some adaptability with technique, and compromises on versatility. For perspective, by contemporary standards Shuns are battleaxes. You want to figure out where your preference is on the spectrum between shun and the lightest blades. Carbon vs. stainless is a religious issue for some people. Nowadays there are great steels of both persuasions. The biggest objective advantage of carbon is that you can get ridiculously high performance for reasonable prices. Other advantages involve sweeping generalizations that don't hold true in all instances. these include somewhat easier sharpening, and abilitiy to take a slightly sharper edge. The biggest disadvantage of carbon steels are their tendency to discolor or add off flavors to certain acidic ingredients. Acidic ingredients also reduce their edge holding ability somewhat. Personally I like stainless in gyuto and paring knife, and carbon in knives that only (or mostly) cut protein.

The best bevel angles depend on both the knife in question and the user. Some knife steels can handle much thinner edges than others. So can some cooks. It's best to thin the knife gradually and see what you can get away with. If you start rolling or chipping the edge, it's either time to refine your skills, or else fatten up the edge with a microbevel. A few thoughts ... It's difficult to know the exact bevel angles of a knife. An edge pro gives you approximations; freehand sharpening gives you wild guesses. Asymmetry is another factor. A highly asymmetrical edge (like one ground 90% on the front side, 10% on the back, will have the performance and fragility of a symmetrical edge ground at more obtuse angles. In these conversations, make sure you're not confusing the total (or included angle) with the angle of each individual bevel. A typical German knife is ground 20 to 22 degrees on a side, which gives a 40 to 44 degree included angle. A typical Japanese knife is ground 15 degrees on each side, for a 30 degree included angle. These factory angles give you very durable edges. People with high end knives sometimes go as low as a 15 degree included angle, with lots of asymmetry. But you can not use a knife like this without very careful techniques. No rock chopping, no pushing hard, no lending the knife to riffraff.

Some people use a gyuto just like a western chef's knife. Others sharpen to a more acute bevel angle than you can use with western techniques; they use techniques that are a hybrid between western techniques and Japanese usuba techniques. The advantage to the first approach is that you already know how to do it. The advantage to the second is that you will have more control, will make better quality cuts, do so with less cutting effort, and have better edge retention. The disadvantage is that you have to learn new skills, and you'll have a knife that's too fragile to lend to the average joe.

Ok, I'd want pans of varying thicknesses for different purposes. Bottoms can be thicker than the sides in most cases. Smaller saucepans can be thinner (2.25mm or so) on the bottoms for responsiveness; larger pans like saute pans, which need to distribute heat farther and retain heat can be thick (3.0 + mm). I'm making up numbers ... an engineer working with serious cooks could pin this down better. Since you're plating and not using the pre-made laminated material, you should be able to make pans with varying thicknesses like this. Definitely not brass for the handles ... to conductive. A cast stainless handle, that's easy to grab with or without a side towel, and that's solid but no so massive that it takes forever to cool down, would be ideal. Tradtitional iron also seems to work fine. I'd also want the selection of pans to be limited to (or at least focus on) pans that make sense for expensive copper. There is no reason besides being a sculpture collector for having a copper stock pot. Saucepans (including a sloped or curve-sided range) are most important. Frying and sauté pans are also nice. A copper rondeau is a great luxury (i don't have one, but if I ever find myself weighed down with currency ... )

I imagine most platings would be so thin as to have pretty negligible thermal properties. I'd be curious about the longevity of the plating in actual use. I've found the anodized layer on aluminum to be less durable than I'd like (I believe aluminum oxide is comparable in hardness to tungsten carbide but I don't know about the other relevent properties). The anodizing is very abrasion resistant, but it's reactive over time, and the soft base metal makes the pans susceptible to pits and gouges, which lead to the anodizing coming off. What are the reactive properties of tungsten carbide? It's cool that it's shiny like that ... I assumed it would be dark. I much prefer bright metal to dark surfaces for most pans ... at least ones that will be used for browning food or reducing sauces.

The most cost effective approach to scales is to have a high capacity scale witn 1 gram resolution, and a low capacity pocket scale with 0.01 gram resolution. The little one is for gums or leavening or anything else that requires precision in small quantities. The big one is for everything else. This funny place is the best source for scales I've found.