You’d knife in the kitchen

Sometimes people take knives for granted. They are a primitive technology, after all, nothing more than an acutely inclined plane, one of humankind’s simplest machines. But if you’ve ever tried to use a hammer to pound your vegetables into pieces for a salad, or to smash single-serving-sized bits off a rotisserie-cooked chicken, you know there’s no substitute for a good knife.

Sometimes you can get away with the hammer, like if you’re preparing garlic for the sauté pan. But even in the best cases, the presentation suffers. Many foods just look a lot better sliced than pulped.

They say that every problem looks like a nail to the man with only a hammer. But our experience cooking with one has not borne out the cliché. Looking down at our carrots on the cutting board with kitchen hammer in hand didn’t make us want to whack them. It made us wish we owned a knife. And ugh, don’t even ask about the time we tried to clean and fillet fish. That was a truly disgusting failure.

So, after almost a whole year of eating nothing that wasn’t pulverized, we’re buying a nine-piece block set of VG-10 stainless steel Shun Ken Onion knives. It’ll be an adjustment, going from zero to nine knives in our previously hammercentric kitchen—but we’re ready. Our new motto is that you can’t have too many good knives.

For cooking, we mean. You can definitely have too many knives in, like, an inflatable Moonwalk.

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