Cutlery

Which knife?

The best first thing is to get is a knife you can multitask with. Japanese and Sushi chefs generally have a slew of knives. One for veggies, one or two for fish boning, one for beef, pork and chicken boning, paring knives for small fish boning ….decorations…a special knife for eels…. Japanese chefs are food surgeons and use a varied amount of very specialized tools. The Chinese and pretty much all other Asians just use cleavers and chop everything bone and all. The Japanese consider this savage and unvarnished.

What material?

Carbon steel is good, but requires lots of maintenance. One could literally teach a class on knife sharpening, forging methods, and carbon silica content in steel. To start you need to find something versatile with chromium, molybdenum, or vanadium as part of the steel content. This makes them more flexible and easier to sharpen.

What brand?

My best advice is MAC brand. They’re stainless, easy to sharpen and cut like a mo-fo. I have one, and I have bought a couple for my parents to use. They’re sharp like a straight razor.

You can get a close up of some here:

http://www.macknife.com/chef.html

$US 45.00

Lightweight utility knife with thin razor-sharp blade and good knuckle clearance

But I would suggest finding or buying MAC here simply because its easier to order on line:

http://www.houserice.com/cutlery.html

http://www.houserice.com/nonsticmacsu.html

Its very versatile and I use it for absolutely everything.

Also make sure to get a Fiskars Roll-Sharp to sharpen it. $15.00 If you use anything else you’ll ruin the knife.

The only down side to this is that after 3 years of heavy use the Teflon is peeling.

Attached are pictures of my blades from school. The long one is a yanagi for slicing fish.

The other cleaver is for filleting fish.

People normally use thin long knives for that in the west. You'll learn why Japanese use the thin ones.

You will want to have another similar one for slicing vegetables. They're wicked sharp. You could easily shave very close with them.

This should give you an idea of where to start. I’m not a big fan of the Henkels or Wustof knives.