Your Expert Guide to Knives, Sharpening & Kitchen Blades in the UK
Right, let’s be honest for a second: most kitchen drawers in Britain have a chef’s knife, a bread knife, and something rusty that used to be sharp. What’s usually missing is the one blade that actually saves you money every time you cook a chicken thigh or a leg of lamb — the best boning … Read more
Ask any baker who’s sliced a warm sourdough boule with a straight-handled knife, and they’ll tell you the same story: knuckles scraping the board, an awkward wrist angle, and a slightly squashed first slice. An offset bread knife solves this with one clever tweak — the handle sits raised above the cutting edge, so your … Read more
There’s a particular kind of kitchen heartbreak that only bread bakers understand: you’ve spent three days nursing a sourdough starter, shaped the loaf with the care of a jeweller setting a stone, and then you grab the wrong knife and squash the whole thing into a doughy pancake. A proper serrated bread knife is the … Read more
There’s a particular kind of kitchen heartbreak that only a bad bread knife can deliver. You’ve spent three days coaxing a sourdough starter back to life, baked the loaf, waited the agonising twenty minutes for it to cool, and then — crunch, squash, disaster. The crust shatters. The crumb collapses into a doughy pancake. Somewhere, … Read more
There’s a moment every home cook knows: you reach for your enormous chef’s knife to hull a strawberry, and it feels like performing keyhole surgery with a shovel. That’s the exact gap a straight paring knife exists to fill. It’s small, it’s nimble, and — done right — it turns fiddly jobs like coring apples, … Read more
There’s a particular kind of knife that professional chefs reach for when they want to do the fiddly, satisfying work — the kind that transforms a potato into a perfect seven-sided football of culinary artistry, or peels a peach so cleanly you could weep. That knife is the bird’s beak paring knife, and it’s the … Read more
There’s a quiet confidence that comes with reaching for the right small knife. Not the hefty chef’s knife — that’s a workhorse, magnificent in its own right — but the nimble, almost unassuming paring knife that handles the fiddly bits: peeling a butternut squash, segmenting a blood orange, removing the eyes from a potato, or … Read more
If you’ve ever lost forty minutes scrolling Amazon.co.uk at some ungodly hour, you’ve almost certainly found yourself caught between a santoku knife and a chef knife. Both claim to be the one blade you truly need. Both look impressive hanging on a magnetic strip. And both will, if you let them, cost you considerably more … Read more
If you’ve ever found yourself hacking at a butternut squash with a chef’s knife that feels roughly as nimble as a garden spade, you already understand the appeal of the western style santoku knife. At its core, a western style santoku knife is a hybrid blade that marries the flat-edged, wide-bellied profile of the Japanese … Read more
There’s a knife sitting in most British kitchen drawers that does everything adequately and nothing brilliantly. You know the one — vaguely sharp, vaguely heavy, bought in a supermarket set sometime around 2017, now relegated to cutting onions and opening post. It works. But it doesn’t sing. A Japanese santoku knife is the antidote. What … Read more