paulraphael

I don't think anyone here wants to collect knives. You're right that finding good blades is easy, but the OP was looking for knives that perform like his Watanabes, which are great blades. Nothing by Forschner, Shun, etc. comes close.

There are hundreds of stainless steels and hundreds of carbon steels. The only thing that makes stainless steel stainless is 13% or more chromium by weight. The amount of carbon and other alloying elements and of all the various proportions of ingredients make a huge difference. Wustof and the other solingen knife makers all use the same alloy; it's one optimized for corrosion resistance and toughness, at the expense of many other performance-related qualities. This alloy has little in common with the higher end stainless knife steels like the one tadatsuna uses. When I compared the white steel Tadatsuna to the stainless one, I found the stainless one to have slightly better edge retetention and resistance to chipping. I also liked that I didn't have to babysit the patina, or worry about it discoloring acidic foods when fresh off the sharpening stones. I have friends who have no problem with this, but I personally prefered the carefree feel of the stainless gyuto. In theory, the carbon steel one should take a slightly sharper edge, but with my journeyman sharpening abilities there was no noticeable difference. Both are extremely easy to sharpen. On the stones the stainless blade feel just like carbon steel. I like carbon steel for knives that mostly cut protein (slicing knives, etc.). I think you can get more bang for you buck with carbon, and for this kind of knife there's no downside. These are just my personal preferences. I know people who who prefer the carbon steel version of this knife. But I can promise that you won't be disapointed with the performance of the stainless version. It's a killer alloy.

Cool! The tadatsunas are rockstars. Any reason you're not considering the stainless one? I've had both the stainless and the white steel ... I kept the stainless one. Either one is so thin that I don't think the right handed version will bug you. If you just focus your sharpening on the other side, within half a year of pro use it will be a lefty knife. Another thought is that this knife is so light and nimble, you'll probably be comfortable with a longer size than you think. The 270mm size has a cutting edge that's actually more like 260mm. And it weighs ounces less than my 8" german knife. There is nothing you can do with a nakiri or a short gyuto that you can't do at least as well with a longer gyuto, unless you're forced to use a tiny workspace. It just takes some some addaptation.

I'd like to test this idea on myself. It seems like you did a bare-knuckles version of what I learned for getting a dog or cat to like new food ... sneak increasingly bigger portions into their current food, until they've gradually make the transition. You did it with will power rather than slow progression and sneakiness.

Did this just happen on it's own, or did you do something to help bring it about?

No difference, besides the generally significant differences in blade shape, metallurgy, and edge geometry. The issue raised was about carbon steel knives discoloring the food. There are carbon and stainless Japanese knives, just as there are carbon and stainless European knives. Sure. Speaking very generally, softer knives are easier to maintain and are more durable. Harder knives support higher performance edge geometries and hold their edges longer ... in other words, the tradeoff is casualness vs. performance. I think there's a lot to be said for the European knife approach. I like the idea of a single, jack-of-all trades chef's knife for all my prep ... one that doesn't need any fussing and that can be whacked into shape on a steel. But I've been spoiled by the performance of the gyuotos I've had, just as the OP seems to have been spoiled by his Watanabes. My recommendations have been based on the assumption that he wants something that performs like his Watanabes, without the specific drawbacks he mentioned.

Exactly, and I'm using "performance" in a precise sense. A knife that performs better isn't necessarily the better knife under all circumstances. Just as a formula-1 car isn't necessarily a better car for you than a mini van, even though in terms of pure performance there's no comparison. Japanese knives (and by this I'm really talking about knives that use Japanese technology, not knives made within their borders or by their citizens; there are now small smiths around the world who for all practical purposes are making Japanese knives) are capable of higher performance than Western knives because of their more sophisticated metalurgy, and the more sophisticated edge geometries that this allows. It's not much more complicated than that. As with many other high performance tools, there can be tradeoffs. If you want the best possible performance, you can't simply substitute a high end knife and continue cutting the way you always have. You have to learn the techniques that the knife supports (which are also the ones it can withstand).

Serious learning curve. Probably the hardest to use knife of them all. None of the techniques you're used to with a gyuto or a nakiri will work with an usuba. It's a fat, single-beveled knife, so it requires all the general single-beveled knife skills in order to cut straight. Also it has no belly at all. The edge hits the board square. So you have to train yourself to keep the edge perfectly square all the time. If the tip points down at all, it will catch. The edge of the knife is extremely thin and brittle and requires extremely delicate technique, otherwise the edge will just chip to pieces. I know people who have taught themeselves to use this knife adequately, as a hobby. But the only people I know who are proficient enough for the knife to make practical sense are chefs with Japanese training. Basically, if you have to ask, you don't want an usuba.

In other threads, some of us have come forward with the foods we don't like. Sometimes it's a matter of guilt (sophisticates are supposed to like truffles); other times inconvenience (brunch menus can be an assault when you don't like eggs); and sometimes a real professional problem (trying do the best possible job when preparing dishes you hate). Has anyone grappled with this and actually gotten themselves to like something? I don't mean overcoming an irrational fear and trying something for the first time ... I mean something you've actually tried—well made examples—and really found them offensive. If so, how did you do it? I'm also interested if you've managed to train the palate of anyone else, like your kids, spouse, or dog.

I've heard some speculation about this, but no clear answers. My hunch is that it's closer to your latter explanation; it's patterned roughly after Western knives and until fairly recently Western cooking was associated heavily with meat in Japan (because the Japanese ate virtually none, and had a strange relationship with the meat they did eat). But the gyuto is not seen as a specialized meat knife. In fact, traditional Japanese patterns like the yanagi make better meat slicing knives, the western-patterned sujihiki is a better carving knive, and the various patterns like honesukis and garasukis and petties make better butchering knives. The gyuto can't do precise vegetable prep as well as an usuba in the hands of someone with the associated hard-won skills. But for a general prep knife, especially where Western foods are concerned it outperforms everything else, including heavier European chef's knives, and the Japanese patterns made for amateur use, like the santoku and nakiri.

I used to pay a lot of attention to things like the feel of a handle and the balance of a knife. That comes from the European tradition of using a heavy knife that isn't especially sharp: you really work the handle on a knife like that. You grip it hard; you use a lot of force. And I still love the big honking handle and the neutral balance of my Schaaf chef's knife, which I pull out for heavy lifting like rock chopping woody herbs, pulverizing bulk chocolate, or beheading innocents. For most prep tasks, though, I use a much lighter and sharper gyuto, and can confidently say that things like the feel of the handle are practically irrelevent. Because you barely grip the knife at all. If European techniques require you to grip a knife like an axe, Japanese techniques require you to manipulate it like a violin bow or a scalpel: fingertips, the lightest possible touch. Any handle that isn't completely idiotic (um ... Mr. Onion, I hope you're not reading) will work fine. You're not even going to notice it. This is why it's a safe bet to buy knives with good reputations sight unseen. There's no guarantee that you'll like any given knife, but the qualities that make or break it for you will become evident with use and sharpening, not with a brief fondling at the store.

The structure in cookies actually comes from the starch in the flour (not gluten development) and from eggs. So you can use piles of oat flour if you want. I settled on 25% by weight ... enough to enhance chewiness and add nutty notes, but not so much that it starts tasting like an oatmeal cookie. I found 33% to be too much.

Removing sugar and gluten? Can you show me any peer reviewed research showing health benefits of doing this (not counting people with celiac disease)? It's a no-brainer to argue that people eat disproportionately too much of many things (top of the list: calories!) But god, the number of basic nutrients that have been demonized over the years as fundamentally bad covers just about all of them. Meanwhile, basic nutrition science, with regard to macronutrient ratios, hasn't changed significantly in 30 years or more. More and more research piles up, just slightly refining the same ideas. As far as high-quality, organic ingredients vs. factory-farmed equivalents ... I don't even know how to address that. You are conflating several ideas that have no fundamental relation to each other. There are high quality orgainic ingredients and low quality organic ingredients; high and low quality non-organic ingredients; high and low quality factory farmed ingredients; even organic and non-organic factory farmed ingredients! If what you're trying to say is that high quality food is healthier than low quality food, I don't think anyone would disagree ... but this thesis is a little too broad to test scientifically.

Yep, I did a bad search on PubMed when I found nothing. But I just did a good search, and found little of substance. The only controlled studies I found dealt with medicine-specific topics, like comparing paleo to other diets in terms of effect on diabetes, heart disease, or obesity. I didn't find any startling (or even strong) conclusions. As far as the general premise, I can't find any authoritative source that claims authority on what people actually ate in the paleo period. Just some educated speculation. They're pretty sure about some of the things that weren't eaten, but other key points, like the ratio of meats to plants, are presumed to have varied wildly. Almost verything we believe about was eaten comes from circumstantial evidence ... dental development, tools, cooking implements, etc.

Just to be clear, diets like the paleo diet are based entirely on speculation, not science. Even paleontologists' ideas about what humans ate during the paleolithic era are speculative (although educated). The effects of diet on paleolithic people's health, and the effects of this diet on our health vs. other diets, constitute wild, uneducated speculation. Also, please beware of doctors hawking diets in print and on the radio. An M.D. is not a nutrition researcher. Nutrition is not part of the curriculum in most medical schools. It's a title that helps people sell books.

Even if you're abusing the bejeezus out it, that's not normal. If you used a vegetable cleaver to hack through bones, you'd expect to either chip or dent the edge. A blade that cracks like that is deffective. Three in a row suggest bad knifemaking. You can either buy a better one, or keep enjoying the free Furis til the well runs dry ...

I haven't used a clad Watanabe knife, so I can't comment on it specifically. But I prefer solid knives to clad ones, because they tend to be more responsive and give better feedback. I've had clad knives that performed well, but I didn't enjoy using them as much. They felt damped, dull. I've been told that not all clad knives feel this way (some have much thinner cladding, or other construction differences) but I've used enough to have a bias. I'd want to talk to someone who's used both clad and unclad watanabes.

I've had knives made from hitachi blue super (one of the blue steels) ... it is marginally less reactive than white steel, but still forms a patina and still will react with acidic foods when the patina isn't there. I have very limited experience with carbon steel gyutos; you could probably get more specific advice from some of the peopple in the kitchen section at knifeforums.com, or the cutlery section at foodieforums.com ... these are bastions of cutlery lunatics with a lot of pros and a lot of high end knife experience. On an non-metalurgical note, I want to reiterate that expensive knives offer few advantages for tasks like breaking down poultry. Rather than trying to get a jack-of-all trades knife for both butchering and precise vegetable work, I think it's much more sensible to have a high performance gyuto for the delicate stuff, and something heavier for the heavy stuff. If you go this route, you can use a german chef's knife or honesuki or some other butchering knife on the fowl, and then get a thin, high performance gyuto for the rest of your prep. There are plenty of stainless knives that offer incredible performance (better in many ways than the Watanabe) ... like the Suisin Inox Honyaki wa gyuto, Ikkanshi tadatsuna inox wa gyuto, Mizuno tanrenjo inox wa gyuto, or at a lower price point the sakai takyuki grand chef. These knives are all stainless, are made out of great alloys that feel almost like carbon steel when cutting and sharpening, and have similarly thin, high performance blade geometries. All are well under $500. But you sacrifice being able to use them for butchering or anything heavy duty. And they'll all require adapting your technique somewhat if you're used to heavier knives.

I'd advise against any shuns, especially considering that you have experience with knives like watanabe. Some points against it: -thick edge geometry means poor performance compared with better Japanese knives (ones not designed for the western export market) -big belly is a disadvantage if you want to use any of the more sophisticated Japanese techniques -the blade is thick and clad, which gives a dull, damped feel -the sg-2 steel is difficult to sharpen. there aren't many benefits that come with this. sending to shun for sharpening is a poor fix, because you're not going to do that often enough, realistically. and a factory edge should be considered the barest minimum level of sharpness for a good knife, not the standard. -for the same price you can get many, many much better knives.

Back to the OP, on the topic of carbon steel knives discoloring onions. I personally prefer stainless gyutos, but have a lot of friends who prefer carbon. All swear up and down that once a decent patina forms, there is no food reaction ... no discoloration, odd tastes, smells etc.. The only catch is that sharpening exposes unoxidized steel, so you have to keep your bevels relatively small and flat. This means not smoothing your cutting bevel into the the main bevel of the blade with a large concave shoulder.

Yeah, none of those are great knives. Your best bet is the web. I have one of the best knife retailers in the country within close reach, and while I've bought quite a few things from them, I bought my last three chef's knives directly from Japan. Local selections are always limited ... it takes a stroke of luck to find your ideal knife at a store, even if you have a good store.

What did you try? With most good knives, there's limited value in holding them at the store. You can get a sense of the shape, weight, edge geometry, esthetics, etc... But the factory edges range from workable to dull, and you won't know anything about performance and edge retention until you've sharpened it and gone to town on some big piles of prep. If you haven't had a chance to use someone else's (well sharpened) buying a knife requires leaning on recommendations, and a certain leap of faith. Which also means that you don't sacrifice much when buying online. The good news is that the Japanese brands that have a good reputation among knife nuts can be resold for close to what you payed.

I think this is worth exploring. Kind of a pain to test, but not conceptually difficult. You'd need to make two identical batches on subsequent days, and have someone besides the cook do the tasting.

If you really need a knife for breaking down birds, presumeably you do a lot of it. A knife made for the task will be much faster than a 10" chef's knife. People who butcher poultry all day long use a honesuki; I can't recommend a brand, but there's no need to spend a lot of money. I personally find an 8" chef's knife faster and more nimble than a 10" knife for this task, and the specialized poultry knives are smaller still. If you also butcher a lot of fish, a 165 to 180mm deba will do a quicker, cleaner job on poultry than a western knife. I would not get a knife like a watanabe or any of the gyutos you mentioned for this task. These knives are designed with a thin edge geometry and are made for high performance with softer foods. You could regrind the edge and make it tough enough to butcher birds, but this makes about as much sense as getting a ferrari and putting monster truck tires on it. Those are all great knives (not counting the Ken Onion ... blech) but none are meant work working around bones. My choices, in order from most generally useful to most specialized and high performance, are: 8" german chef or 210mm cheap, thick gyuto with fat bevel angles; generic 6" boning knife (this works pretty well); 165 or 180mm cheap deba, with a back bevel put on the last couple of inches for crashing through bones; honesuki.

Something to consider: disk-bottom pans often have a much thicker piece of conductive material on the bottom than straight gauge pans. Not always, but it's common. The result is significant performance differences that are separate from the fundamental properties of these designs. Pans with a thick disk tend to heat extremely evenly. They also tend to have high thermal mass, making them excellent for browning big pieces of meat on the underpowered burners most of us have. The tradeoff is that they respond slowly to changes in flame size, making them harder to control. A pan with a thick disk can therefore be a great choice on something like a 12" rondeau, and a lousy choice for small saucepan used for reducing cream sauces or whisking emusified egg yolk sauces.