Get the most from your knives

August 11, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

By Sarah Mark

Washington Post

When I picked up my chef’s knife the first time, its eight-inch blade seemed as scary as a machete. How could I use something that big without drawing blood?

I was obviously a kitchen-knife neophyte. That was before I learned how to hold the chef’s knife — in ways I never thought a knife should be held — and before I learned the all-important (but frankly awkward) “claw,” a way of tucking the fingertips of my other hand safely out of the way of a cutting blade. It was before I learned a lot of other things about my knives, too, things that can make a home cook perform more like a sophisticated chef.

My transformation began when I went public with my intimidation. As I wrote last year in a Post Food section piece praising my six-inch steak knives, the chef’s knife was part of a wedding-registry gift set that had been gathering dust in a block on my countertop because I hadn’t a clue how to use it. Instead, I relied on those steak knives for just about all my slicing needs. After the article was published, the public-relations reps for Zwilling J.A. Henckels Corp. got in touch with an offer: Henckels’ executive chef, Jeffrey Elliot, would give me a private tutorial.

It’s not that I don’t know how to cook. I’m more than competent in the kitchen, and those steak knives are nimble to use and can cut anything from a shallot to a small roast. But I’m intrigued by the prospect of expanding my repertoire. After all, it’s not easy to use a steak knife to cut a green pepper into julienne.

Elliot spent five hours introducing me to the six primary knives in my standard set: the chef’s knife, paring knife, bread knife, tomato knife, boning knife and utility knife. But I wasn’t done: My interest was piqued, so I signed up for a three-hour knife-skills class with chef instructor Brian Patterson at L’Academie de Cuisine’s Gaithersburg, Md., campus.

It turns out that I’m not the only cook out there depending on steak knives, and both instructors seemed frustrated by that. Elliot complained that their serrated blades result in ragged-looking food, and Patterson said I’d get a lot more control with a chef’s knife. I still love the steak knives, but Elliot and Patterson have persuaded me to use other implements, especially the chef’s knife.

Of course, my fear of the eight-inch knife was overblown and based on misconceptions. You are not supposed to use it to hack through food as if you are clearing brush. Instead, you keep the knife close to the cutting board and slice or chop with small movements in a tiny area, letting the breadth, weight and sharpness of the blade do the work.

Patterson calls the chef’s knife (also called a cook’s knife) the workhorse of the kitchen. It’s used for chopping, dicing, cutting food into matchstick-size pieces (julienne), mincing and, occasionally, other types of slicing. The blade can range in length from six to 14 inches. My chef’s knife has a micro-serrated blade designed for beginners, and it occasionally got stuck in tougher vegetables.

So I borrowed Elliot’s straight-edge knife to learn what a chef’s knife is capable of. I have to admit, his knife has advantages over my steak knife. With an awesome power, the knife requires just one guillotinelike stroke to complete a slice. And the sharpness of the blade makes it possible for me to make attractive, similar-size pieces, ensuring uniform cooking time. When I create thin slices of yellow squash or diced cubes of bell pepper, I beam as if I were a chef on one of those TV cooking shows.

But the learning curve has been steep. The chef’s knife is handled differently from other knives. I’m sure many experienced cooks know all this, but I was surprised when Elliot instructed me on how to hold it: to pinch the top of the blade between the thumb and the forefinger in front of the handle. I asked him (twice) if he was serious about touching the metal. He nodded yes. The other three fingers grasp the handle.

The rule for securing the food with the other, guiding hand was another surprise. You bend the fingers in a claw shape, with “nails down, knuckles forward,” Patterson says. Elliot emphasizes that the nails are tucked under a little. Another weird encounter with the blade: Align it against the knuckles of the middle and index fingers of the guide hand to position and stabilize the knife.

With the chef’s knife, you don’t use the back-and-forth sawing I’m used to with the steak knife. Instead, you move down and forward. Elliot says that most of the contact with the food is with the back third of the blade near the handle. And the tip of the blade should be touching the board when possible. In his class notes, Patterson writes, “The front end of the blade acts as a pivot, a fulcrum, a hinge, grounding the knife to the cutting board, setting up a predictable plane of cutting. If the tip of the chef’s knife is not anchored to the cutting board, it should be on its way to being anchored. ...”

For practice, I started by slicing celery stalks. Then Elliot showed me how to cut off a potato’s ends and square off the other two sides by cutting them to be flat. I then sliced the potato lengthwise into 1/4-inch-thick planks. I stacked the planks and cut them into batons, which, in turn, could be diced for hash browns.

My set is the J.A. Henckels International Everedge Plus, for cooks unfamiliar with fancy sets. The knives, which are either micro-serrated or fully serrated, can’t be sharpened but last about 15 years, Elliot says. Straight-edge knives are sharper but need to be maintained by using a honing steel before each use and professionally sharpened periodically.

After the chef’s knife, Elliot says, the most important and useful piece of my set is the paring knife. Here’s what I learned about it:

The paring knife looks like a miniature chef’s knife. It’s for peeling and carving fruit and vegetables, and it is occasionally drafted for chopping and dicing duty, Patterson says.

Elliot taught me how to make pretty strawberry pieces with it. Cut a strawberry in half, lay one piece flat side down and place the knife’s point below the stem and parallel to the long edge of the fruit. Slice thin segments across the strawberry, leaving the stem intact. Press down to make a fan.