Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

& Cutting Performance — A Quick & Dirty Demonstration">Knife Quality & Cutting Performance — A Quick & Dirty Demonstration

A good knife cuts bet­ter than a crappy knife. An excel­lent knife cuts bet­ter than a good knife. So what makes a good knife good, and an excel­lent knife excel­lent? It has to do with the steel qual­ity, blade geom­e­try, and the sharp­en­ing quality.

In this fol­low­ing video, I demon­strate by using paper, how some knives cut bet­ter than oth­ers. Yes, I know, nobody cuts paper for food. How­ever, it is a good proxy for meat & veg­eta­bles because it shows you how well the knife edge bites into the paper and how well it can carry through the cut — or not.

In this demo, I show how steel qual­ity & sharp­en­ing qual­ity affect knives’ cut­ting abilities.

1. Henck­els 210mm / 8″ chef knife, “single-guy”, forged, sharp­ened by me to 5,000 grit
2. Henck­els 260mm / 9.5″ chef knife, “twin”/Pro-S, sharp­ened by me to 5,000 grit
3. Tanaka VG-10 240mm gyuto, sharp­ened by me to 10,000 grit
4. Takeda AS (Aogomi Super) 270mm gyuto, sharp­ened by pre­vi­ous owner to 5,000 grit
5. Fuji­take VG-1 300mm gyuto, sharp­ened by me to 10,000 grit