What Kind of Cutlery Do You Use for Fruits?

K

-Kiku-

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Aug 13, 2020
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I am not a professional cook. With that in mind, I am currently in the market for a nakiri. For nearly a decade, I've been using el-cheapo Chinese cleavers, the kind you can pick up from Walmart for under $20. I like the weight and feel of these cleavers. Although they aren't true cleavers in any true sense of the word, they do a decent enough job of cutting up meat with small bones in them.

Seeing as how I am cutting vegetables about 98% of the time, however, the other 2% being cutting of beef/pork/poultry, mostly boneless, it made me think perhaps I would be better off with a dedicated vegetable knife. Hence the reason for looking into nakiri.

So I asked around in other forums for a good brand of nakiri and several suggestions were made. A name that came up often was Watanabe Pro 180mm Nakiri. There were couple others, but just about ALL of the recommended knives were made of either Shirogami and Aogami. To my understanding, both are reactive metal, not something I'd want to use to cut acidic fruits and vegetables such as apples, oranges, limes, and lemons as doing so will impart unpleasant metallic taste to the food.

Some of you might own a full blown cutlery set. But for a minimalist like me, I like to stick with just one or two knives to handle the majority of prep work - this is for home kitchen. Even when I am cutting up wide variety of ingredients, I don't like to swap out knives in-between tasks.

I am curious what kind of cutlery you folks use at home.

Is your cutlery made of high carbon steel or stainless steel?
If high carbon steel, do you have a separate knife, made of nonreactive metal just for slicing acidic food? If no (to having a separate nonreactive blade), are you able to taste the carbon in the food that was cut by a carbon blade?

I don't want to deal with having a separate knife just for cutting fruits so I am leaning strongly towards a nakiri made of either SRS13 or SRS15. If any of you have had prior experience with either of these stainless steels, I'd like to hear about your experience. How well do they work? Are they able to attain sharp edge? How about the edge retention?
 
Tahamagane Pro line is the best Japanese line out there. You’ll get all of the important things like Quality Steel & Heat Treat along with well thought out designs & well ground/execution without fancy frills. Amazon & others carry them.
 
Sakon is a brand that offers an SRS15 Nakiri. Available from MTC in NYC. Most Japanese makers don't offer nakiris in powder steels.
 
... I was asking for what/which brand and specific model of a knife members use to cut their fruits with. I wasn't asking for a recommendation on which knife to buy. My apologies if I didn't make that very clear in the original post.
 
All of my kitchen knives are some variety of stainless, well, except for one that is aogami steel core clad in stainless. I don't find fruit cutting to require a special dedicated knife. I will use any random thing from a $3 paring knife up to a chef's knife.

Since you wanted some specific brand information:

The cheap stuff was made by KAI for a particular retailer, which I picked up on sale, very similar to the colorful KAI Pure Komachi products. Soft steel but sharpens easily and the blades are very thin so they do a fine job on fruit.

Another one I often use is a Zwilling Pro 5.5" Prep Knife, which has a kind of gyuto-like profile and does a fine job for things where a paring knife is too small but you don't need a full chef's knife. They don't say what their super-secret steel is but it is probably 4116 or something close.

If for some reason I am doing a full meal prep and have bigger knives out already, I will use whatever that may be. I have three I use more than anything else: Shun Classic 7" Asian Chef's Knife, Shun Classic Nakiri 6.5", Shun Premier 8" Kiritsuke (not really a kiritsuke just has that kind of tip, but has a flatter profile than their typical Chef's knives). All of those are VG-MAX which is Shun's proprietary variation on VG-10.

I have a couple of knives, Richmond brand made by Lamson, that use AEB-L steel. A paring and a 8" chefs, that might also end up cutting fruit if needed.
 
jc57 jc57
It seems that just about all of your cutlery, especially the ones that you use to cut fruits with, are stainless steels.
Have you ever used non-stainless steels on highly acidic fruits or acidic fruits that have very delicate flavor?

Someone at KKF tried to allay my concerns about tasting carbon in acidic food (from using high-carbon non-SS knives). That someone did a reasonably good job, but I tend to be stubborn. As such, it'll take more than an input from one or two people to convince me to give a non-stainless steel knives a chance.
 
If reaction affecting taste is a concern, use a ceramic knife.

Ceramic knives are great at resisting acid if cutting citrus in a bar all night or cutting bait on a fishing boat.
 
I use my Santoku. I prefer it to other styles like the Guyuto for general purpose use. There are many good brand names.
 
-Kiku- said:
Have you ever used non-stainless steels on highly acidic fruits or acidic fruits that have very delicate flavor?
Click to expand...
Nope, other than using a carbon-steel pocketknife occasionally to cut apples. But even then, I'd rather use stainless for food.

I'll leave the really high-end shirogami knives to those who can get the best use out of them. That's not me. I am just an average guy who cooks once in a while.
 
At the time I created this thread, I was still undecided on my replacement cutlery. But now that's decided, this thread is no longer really relevant.

FYI, I decided to go fully stainless with exotics like SRS15 and ZDP189. I have penchant for high-end exotic stainless steels. It's a curse.

Thanks, everyone.

EDIT: How do I close this thread? Anyone know?
 
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