Need help QUICK: What's better all around KITCHEN use? 6" Santuko or 8" Chefs...

Walking Man

Walking Man

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Hi,..... I'd like to recommend a kitchen knife to my brother.
While I've thought frequently about a Santuko, I've never actually owned one.
For those of you that own both, which will get used more in the kitchen.
Thanks.
 
8 inch chef knife

Anything below is hard to use for heavy chopping and any job that requires leverage.

I run a kitchen with 50 employees and we have NO 6 inch knives, and be usually use 10 inch blades. Of course, we use pearing knives, etc, but for all around utility, anything below 8inches is useless.

Take care,
Brett
 
To swim against the stream, I don't see it quite as clear cut as the others. After thinking long and hard, I would go with the 8" chefs as well, but I think there is a big difference whether you are working in a professional kitchen and are preparing quantities of food accordingly, or whether you are working at home in your own kitchen especially when the kitchen is small. I know quite a few people that tend to grab the 6" Santoku (me included) even though they have an 8" chefs handy. The 6" Santoku has more tip control (but less of a tip, so I prefer the Santokus that are more of the shape of a Deba), but can't handle the real large tasks (which after thinking the 8" gets the nod from me as well). Very important to me though is either way that the knife offers enough clearance underneath the handle that the knuckles don't hit the board/table.
 
The correct answer is both, but I use my 6" wustof santoku more than any other knife in my block. Its just myself and my wife so I'm not making dinner for 20, but I still prepare a great deal of veggies and such so its kind of my all purpose knife.

Its large enough to chop, but not too large as to be cumbersome.
 
I'd go with an 8" Chefs knife, but I'm not your brother - what's your brother like? If it's to be a surprize, get him a chefs knife - an 8" Shun or 8.2" Blazen should make him very happy after the bleeding stops. Yoshikane makes a mean one, too.
 
I own both and use both although the santuko is a great prep knife it is limited.An 8" or pref. 10" is much more versatile and practical. The cheapest decent knife is from victorinox.
 
It depends a lot on how adept your brother and his household are with knives. I direct teams of volunteers down at the local soup kitchen. They prepare food for 400 people in about 2.5 hours. Their experience level is generally amateur down to never-seen-a-sharp-knife-before. I bring sharp knives for them to use.

I bring very few knives longer than 8 inches anymore. I literally had people cutting themselves, going into shock and going to the hospital. That was despite my giving them knife handling and safety lessons. Young, inexperienced males would reach for the longest, pointiest blades around and use them badly. One of the things I learned is that amateurs should not chop with blades. They don't have enough control and hit their fingers. I also learned that macho guys will try and use the point of a long knife to open packages and will stab themselves in the hand.

I found for this crowd something like a 7-inch Santoku is fairly optimum. It slices and push cuts well but is light enough to discourage chopping. The length is short enough to be pretty easy to control. Because it isn't really pointy it discourages the stabbing/thrusting maneuvers that cause so many accidents. It is long enough for most food prep except splitting watermelons and fast chopping of whole heads of lettuce. I bring several longer blades to the soup kitchen, but I don't allow them to be used where a shorter knife is optimal.

The knife preferences of amateurs tends to reflect what they have seen on TV cooking shows or what mom always used. Right now the idiots go for Santokus with cullens (indentions in the side of the blade). This is a dumb idea for this type of knife. It makes the blade and edge thicker than you need. A plain santoku without the cullens is also pretty popular and accepted as "the right kind of knife" by housewives. Sometimes you have to give the crowd what they want. The biggest problem that I have with the women is a tendency to prefer little paring knives for everything. That is what mom did and it is what they feel safest with. I pretty much force everybody to use 6 to 8 inch knives to push them to be more productive. I pick designs like chefs knives or santokus that work efficiently on a cutting board and show them how to gang up the food and cut several pieces in each push cut.

So for amateurs I would probably go with a 7-inch santoku, for a disciplined and experienced chef I would go for an 8 to 10 inch chefs knife. I would go for Japanese manufacture regardless of the design. I generally avoid bolsters since it makes it hard to sharpen the heal of the blade and I don't encourage chopping. I think that MAC knives perform well and are well priced. Here are some examples:
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If you shop the internet you can find good prices on MAC knives, for example: http://www.knifeoutlet.com/shop/10Expand.asp?ProductCode=MACSK65
 
murry carter makes 4-5 inch paring knives they are typically longer than a standard paring knife 4-5 inches is my most used knife in thev kitchen i cook alot
 
I think Jeff said it all. I would want to add, that often I get lazy and tend to do paring work with a chefs knife. It is not that I don't have one handy, it is just that I am in the middle of things and continue with the blade that I am already holding. A 6" Santoku style knife will allow you to do that while an 8" chefs knife tends to get unwieldy. There are also 6" chefs knifes but in my experience they tend to have too little clearance under the handle for my hands.
 
I like a 6 inch chef's knife, clearance is an issue, but if I'm choppng I use something else anyway
 
For slicing and dicing veggies I prefer a Santoku, for working with large pieces of meat or fish I would rather use an 8"+ chef's knife. But if I could only have one I'd go with the Santoku, its usually lighter and faster and offers better control, and if its sharp, very sharp, it can handle the bigger jobs reasonably well. I so rarely need to chop in the kitchen and when I do I grab an old beater knife and hack away.
 
I will be the contrarian.

Both the Mrs and I prefer a 5-6" Santoku-style for general kitchen prep work.

The stock is taller, which gives it better control, and it seems to be less tip-heavy.I personally hate the amount of tip momentum in an 8" chef, given that for my primary knife, I like it to not only move fast but feel effortless.

Then again, we generally cook Asian food, which predominantly means push cutting and slicing soft tissue and/or vegetables into small pieces (dicing) or julienning.

We rarely fillet and never chop bones with it, and when we do, we have a 6" cleaver.

I find anything longer than 6" to be unwieldy when cutting quickly.

Furthermore, I find that I rarely use much more than 4-5" of blade in a slice, even in something tall like doing a full cucumber/squash. I think part of what contributes is that we are 5'7" and an 8" chefs really has too much blade length to get a comfortable, quick, clearance with my arm and feel confident that I'm in full control of the tip.

A 5-6" blade will also make do as a paring knife, with some difficulty, whereas with an 8" chef's, someone not necessarily paying the most attention may turn this task into a great bloodletting adventure.

-j
 
Thank you for all of advise. I have found it very informative.
I hope others have as well.
 
Another soup kitchen story--
One business that supports the soup kitchen is the famous Broadmoor Hotel. Besides providing surplus equipment some of the staff helps out on occasion. One time when I was leading the food prep Sigi, the executive chef, showed up to help. Here is a guy with 45 years experience, and here I am, Joe Engineer, directing the show. He was appalled at all the short cuts we took in the hot kitchen so we went into the cold prep area to work on the salads. This was a good thing, normally we would have 6 to 8 volunteers working on the salads, this time it was Sigi, me, and a kid with aspirations to become a chef. The kid bypassed my sharp knives and grabbed a cheap and dull santoku with cullens from the soup kitchen stock. I handed Sigi a thin and razor sharp 9" MAC knife which he really liked. Personally I used a MAC UK-60 for most of the work until we moved on to mellons. Sigi and I were able to do the work of about 6 amateurs, the kid ranked right up there with an average housewife.

Here's what Sigi used for most of his work:
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The Yadama by Boker. This knife is a blend of santoku and the traditional chef knife designs. It will be your go-to knife in the kitchen. I wish I had one when I was cooking- back in the day.
Lycosa
 
8" stainless chinese cleaver! cuts everything easily! i just can't pair with it. chop! chop!
 
Two considerations - is he a knut or not, and does he cut mostly vegetables, mostly meat, or a mix?

If he's not a knife nut, go with something in stainless, thicker stock - i.e. European style. There's no sense in having a thin, hard, Japanese style blade if it's going to be damaged with improper handling and then be difficult to sharpen back into useability.

Given a single knife for all-around use, the Chef's knife and longer blade will cover more tasks. However, a santoku would cover most of my kitchen work (which tends toward veggies and small cuts of meat, no huge roasts or whole fish to fillet) and be more generally useable. I can reach for a pointy boning or paring knife for the odd task that requires a point.

The best advice is to go to a store and find something that feels good in the hand.

Some recommendations:

European forged chef's knife - Mundial - not the fanciest, but a decent bargain
MAC - generally highly regarded

Commercial cutlery - thinner blades, plastic handles, will do lots of work for the price:
F. Dick Eurocut Line
Messermeister Four seasons

Japanese - Shun Wasabi - this is their stamped line, plastic handles, stainless. Good performance for the price, with thinner blade stock and harder edges
http://www.cooking.com/products/shprodli.asp?BrandNo=1441&DeptNo=5000&StyleNo=2509

Spyderco - basic santoku

I'm assuming that since your brother needs a recommendation, he probably doesn't have something super-fancy in mind. Most of the above recommendations skew to lower cost models.
 
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