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You May Not Need a Giant Chef’s Knife When a Midsize Knife Does the Trick
Kitchen knives are so personal. You can do almost everything you need in a kitchen with a chef's knife, paring knife, and a bread knife. But the more time you spend in the kitchen, the more you develop preferences, and soon it becomes a bit of an n+1 thing, and there you are, pondering a cleaver.
There's a lot of space between most chef's knives and paring knives. What's in that space—often called petty, prep, or utility knives—is often pretty weird. Consider the knives that you never use from a set and you'll likely think of the short, serrated knives or the petty knives with no room for your fingers between the handle and the cutting board.
What if you're a smaller person, or have smaller hands, or just think a smaller but still high-functioning all-around knife might be your jam? What if the right version of those midsize knives turned out to be really useful?
To my delight, the good ones are. With equal parts luck, research, and trial and error, I found both new and existing-but-flying-under-the-radar examples of midsize knives that were wonderfully functional, in part because of their size. The right ones are incredibly useful and the great ones are prep monsters.
Recently, I had seen signs at my favorite trade show that I might be on to something. At the Messermeister knives booth, a midsize blade stood out thanks to an olive wood handle and intriguing geometry. It felt balanced and comfortable with room for hands of any size to move back on the handle, or further forward in a pinch grip. Importantly, there was plenty of clearance, so knuckles don't hit the cutting board at the bottom of the stroke. Keeping my eyes open, I saw more potential from Cangshan, Tarrerias-Bonjean, and Zwilling. This got my mind going. I remembered the Wusthöf Classic chef's knife that comes in a 5-inch size. Similarly, I hoped I could find a short version of a nimble Japanese knife called a kiritsuke and put in a call to the good people at Seisuke Knife in Portland, Oregon.
Soon, I had a pile of beautiful knives on my cutting board. I tucked my own knives into my knife roll for storage and, for weeks, used the new, smaller specimens as my daily drivers.
The more I used them, the more I understood what I wanted. First, I threw their unhelpful names out the window: petty, utility, prep … whatever. Next, I decided my lovely Tadafusa santoku, the shortest of my longer knives, would be the longest I'd go at roughly 6.5 inches. Having these knives "do it all" felt like a stretch, but they definitely needed to be able to do a lot. I was willing to work with the knife to find its strengths, but preferred something that could handle different cutting styles and all kinds of food. They had to be prep monsters.
I pulled out some new cookbooks and recipes I'm excited about, starting with Down South + East by Ron Tsu with Hugh Amano, and made their stir-fried collard greens with bacon and soy-braised chicken, swapping knives in and out as I went. This practice, it turns out, drags dinner prep to a near halt, but it told me a lot about the knives.
A few blades got the heave-ho right away. They crushed the food as much as they were cutting or slicing, a likely combo between a bad edge and a thick blade. (Think of how a dull knife mushes an onion into translucence beneath the blade before beginning to cut.) Others, like a rough-mannered Henckels simply weren't that comfortable.
Yet some were quick standouts. Messermeister's Oliva Elite presented as a nice workhorse, mincing garlic well enough, capably slicing stacks of raw bacon into matchsticks, and making parsley-chopping fun as the swoop of the blade makes for a wonderful rocking motion. It stemmed the collards easily and later made surprisingly quick work of chopping up the stems to make Tamar Adler's garlicky stem and core pesto from The Everlasting Meal Cookbook. The Zwilling Pro 5.5 Inch Prep Knife performed admirably thanks in part to an angled bolster, the metal collar where the handle meets