Your Expert Guide to Knives, Sharpening & Kitchen Blades in the UK
Ask ten British cooks what sits in their knife block and you’ll get ten shrugs when you mention slicing knife vs carving knife — most people own one or the other by accident, not by design. A slicing knife is a long, often flexible blade built to glide through cooked meat, bread or fish in … Read more
There’s a very specific kind of panic that hits British kitchens every 25th of December: the turkey is resting under foil, the gravy’s on the go, twelve people are hovering with plates, and whoever’s holding the carving knife is sawing away like they’re trying to fell a small tree. An electric carving knife exists to … Read more
There’s a very specific kind of panic that hits at 1pm on a Sunday, gravy simmering, guests hovering, and you’re stood over a joint of beef armed with something that’s more butter knife than blade. A best carving knife isn’t a luxury — it’s the difference between neat, generous slices and a plate of shredded, … Read more
Standing in front of a knife display, torn between an 8 inch and 10 inch blade, feels a bit like choosing between a hatchback and an estate car. Both will get the job done, but one suits your driveway (and your drawer) a lot better than the other. The 8 inch vs 10 inch chef … Read more
Stand in front of a knife rack in any busy British kitchen and you’ll spot the confusion instantly: two long, skinny blades that look almost identical, sitting there like siblings nobody bothered to introduce properly. That’s the boning knife vs filleting knife dilemma in a nutshell, and it trips up far more home cooks than … Read more
There’s a very specific kind of heartbreak that comes from mangling a beautiful piece of salmon because your knife wouldn’t flex, wouldn’t hold an edge, or simply wasn’t built for the job. A fish filleting knife is a long, narrow-bladed knife — usually flexible or semi-flexible — designed to glide along a fish’s spine and … Read more
A stiff boning knife is the one tool that separates a tidy, waste-free joint from a hacked-about mess on the chopping board. If you have ever wrestled a leg of lamb apart with a wobbly, flexible blade and watched half the meat stay stubbornly attached to the bone, you already know why butchers reach for … Read more
If you’ve ever tried to skin a mackerel with a chef’s knife, you already know why a flexible filleting knife exists. The blade needs to bend. Not “sort of flex if you lean on it” bend — genuinely curve along the spine of a fish while your ordinary kitchen knives sit there rigid and useless, … Read more
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