Chef's knife

The chef's knife is the tool that every hand in the kitchen picks up a hundred times a day. For dicing onions, quartering tomatoes, mincing garlic, parsley, ginger. No other piece of kitchen tool is moved so often — and accordingly, a good chef's knife changes daily life more than any new appliance.

How to recognize a good chef's knife: It feels right from the first grip. The balance between blade and handle is so well-tuned that the knife almost does the cutting work itself. You only guide the direction.

Two Solingen Schools

Güde Solingen has been forging fully-forged knives since 1910 — meaning the blade and bolster are made from a single piece of steel. The knife becomes heavier, more robust, and more forgiving. If you cut with force, work with bones, or with hard vegetables — Güde is the right choice for you.

Herder Windmühlenmesser takes the opposite approach. The blades are thinly ground, sometimes from carbon steel (the steel traditionally used by Japan and France for their sharpest knives). A Herder chef's knife cuts a tomato without crushing it — but it also demands attention. No dishwasher, dry the blade, sharpen regularly.

Which Blade for Whom

• 16 cm — the small version, for fine cutting, for smaller hands.
• 20 cm — the standard, covers 80% of kitchen work.
• 23 cm — for big wok days, for large quantities of vegetables, for carving poultry.
• 26 cm — the professional size, for people with large hands and confident technique.

What really matters for sharpness: The most important thing for a knife is not the steel, but how it is treated. Never put knives in the dishwasher (aggressive cleaners attack the cutting edge), dry the blade immediately after use, cut on a wooden board, never on glass or stone. These three rules alone double the lifespan of a cutting edge. The most expensive sharpening stone cannot compensate for this afterwards.

See also: Santoku & Yatagan Knives, Bread & Vegetable Knives, Knife Accessories & Sharpening.