The two knives you must have and one that’s nice

When I’m in our local Bed, Bath and Beyond, I like to eavesdrop on the young couples picking out kitchen equipment for their wedding registry. “Oh, we really need this set of cookware” Or knives. Or something else. I don’t say anything in the store but I’m going to here. Specifically about knives. No, you don’t need the whole set of knives. In fact I’ll say you need two knives for your kitchen with one more being nice to have.

The first being a 8 inch (or longer) chefs knife. If you really like the santoku knives, you could use one but I find their blades too short. The longest ones I’ve seen are seven inches. In the picture above, the chefs knife with the black handle has an eight inch blade and the larger one with the white handle is twelve inches. I think a longer blade allows you a bit more efficiency when chopping.

A chefs knife is the most used knife in the kitchen. Chopping, slicing, dicing are all in the realm of this blade. It’s designed to do a number of tasks rather than be specialized in one.

The second must have piece of cutlery is a paring knife. There are times when the large blade of the chefs knife just gets in the way of a job. Things like separating cauliflower florets, stemming tomatoes and trimming a piece of fruit. Generally blade length is around three and a half inches and I prefer an edge with a pretty straight profile.

The knife that’s nice to have would be a serrated blade knife, sometimes called a bread knife. The edge on these knives are kind of notched, like a little saw. These are normally about eight to ten inches in length and don’t come to a sharp point. If you’ve ever tried to cut through a soft roll with a regular bladed knife, you’ll be able to appreciate what this knife can do. It also works really well for cutting tomatoes, which also tend to squish instead of cutting cleanly.

So there you have it, the two you really need and one that’s awfully nice to have. And I’m sure some of my sharper-eyed readers will have noticed I say you only need three knives but my knife bar, shown above, has five. Am I lying? No, not really. The large chefs knife I picked up at a local restaurant supply place as an experiment. First, to find out if I really prefer a longer bladed knife without having to spend a bunch of money. Secondly, just to see how nice the restaurant supply company’s knives are. I haven’t reached a firm conclusion yet but I’m certainly not going to hide my Shun knife away. So that’s why I have two chef’s knives. And the two paring knives? Well, I have a bad habit of using paring knives for things they aren’t really intended for. So the second paring knife is the one I reach for when I’m going to do something stupid. Kind of a sacrificial blade.