Chef's Path Professional Chef Knife Set - 8" Ultra Sharp Japanese Santoku Kitchen Knife - German High Carbon Stainless Steel Chefs Knife with Sheath & Premium Packaging - Best Value Cooking Knife

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While testing, we liked that the handle rested perfectly in the center of our palm and felt natural to hold.

The blade is wider than most of the other options on this list, so it's not as nimble, but the knife is well-balanced and offers stability. This makes them less adept at the rock-chop (though they can still be used that way), and more adept at a pulling stroke. Good Housekeeping participates in various affiliate marketing programs, which means we may get paid commissions on editorially chosen products purchased through our links to retailer sites. Mercer Culinary MX3 Premium San Mai VG-10 Steel Core Blade: This is the company's stab at a more Japanese-style design.We chopped some onions while gripping the knife farther back on the handle and found that the contoured handle accommodated that style of grip well. This German classic is fully forged and has a full tang (meaning the metal of the blade runs through the whole handle), which helps it feel perfectly balanced and ergonomic in your hand, but can be on the heavier side for some. That said, for most home cooks, an 8-inch knife is the sweet spot: Large enough to tackle produce like pineapples and butternut squash, but not so big that it feels unwieldy. Compared with the other forged German knives we tested, this one’s thinner blade cut more smoothly through all of the veggies we chopped.

The carbon steel holds its edge very well and is especially easy to sharpen, but is more prone to rusting if you're not careful with it. If you’re starting out, it’s safer to place the tip of the honing rod on a cutting board, with the rod perpendicular to the board. Once made of wood, the handle is now made of polyoxymethylene, a durable type of plastic that won't crack or degrade with extended use or when exposed to moisture. A fan-favorite among our experts, Hedley and Bennett’s Chef’s Knife has been used in our Kitchen Appliances Lab since it first came out, and it also makes frequent appearances in our personal home kitchens as well. This name - Sabatier - quickly became a byword for quality, and was adopted by many local knife makers.It would’ve been one of our top picks, but our testers were split down the middle: People either loved this knife for its lightweight and razor-sharp edge or hated it because of its dimpled steel handle (which could get slippery in wet hands). As for length, for this review, I stuck to knives with roughly 8-inch blades, which is the most common size. The telltale sign of a crack: a rough and uneven face on the sliced carrot instead of a smooth and even one. Knives that are too wedge-shaped, or that have some other design or edge shortcoming, however, have a tendency to crack the carrot before finishing the stroke, much the way an axe can split wood all the way through even if the axe itself gets stuck halfway. It's an affordable, all-purpose tool that does an ace job of blitzing parsley, dicing onions and deboning a chicken.