Smokey Mountain Knife Works

If you want to get serious about being a good cook, about impressing your friends and serving amazing food, then you need to get serious about building a quality set of kitchen knives.

Whether you are a professional cook or an ambitious amateur, high quality kitchen knives will help you go a long way towards being the kind of cook that you always wanted to be. If you are relying on cheap cutlery in your kitchen, at best you are making things needlessly more difficult for yourself, and at worst are inviting a serious injury. This article will give you the basic information you need to start putting together a quality set of kitchen knives today.

THE BASIC KNIVES FOR YOUR KITCHEN

 The foundation of your knife set will be your Chef’s knife (also called a Cook’s knife). Its name is indicative of the versatile nature of the knife. It is your general all-purpose knife, used for most tasks from slicing to dicing to mincing to chopping. If you have a limited amount of money to spend on kitchen knives, then concentrate on getting a quality Chef’s knife. A Chef’s knife is around 8 inches long and features a gently sloping blade. After you have purchased your Chef’s knife, you can move on to a paring knife. A paring knife is really just a smaller version of your Chef’s knife, generally at around 4 inches in length. Your paring knife will be perfect for smaller or more detailed jobs where your Chef’s knife could be unwieldy. The final knife you should get to round out your basic set is a bread knife. A bread knife is ideally suited for cutting bread, hence its name. It is by no means limited to bread, however. The important facet of the bread knife is its serrated edge. A serrated edge has a serious of u-shaped indentions which makes it great for cutting anything that would be crushed from the pressure of the straight blade on a Chef’s knife or paring knife. Moving on past your basic three knives, the possibilities are endless.

HOW TO LOOK AFTER YOUR KNIVES

Now that you have bought some high quality kitchen knives, it is important to look after them to make sure that there are in as good shape as possible; after all, no matter how good your knives are, if you do not look after them you might as well be using butter knives for everything you do. The most important thing is to get your knives professionally sharpened on at least a yearly basis. Also make sure that your knives are kept clean, but never put them in the dishwasher. All they need is to be washed by hand with a mild detergent and then quickly hand dried. And never put your knives into contact with any other metal object. If the blade of your knives is in constant contact with other metal, it will quickly dull your knife’s blade and can even lead to dreaded rusting. Keep your high quality knives in their own knife block.