Peter Hertzmann: Culinary Tools Expert
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Peter Hertzmann is the author of Knife Skills Illustrated: A User’s Manual and the creator, author, and illustrator of the e-zine à la carte, which has been in continuous publication since 1999 and currently enjoys about half a million visitors a year. He also teaches cooking classes both in the United States and internationally. Peter’s obsession with knives and other aspects of la batterie de cuisine goes back to the early 1970s when he started his life-long interest in cooking and culinary traditions. For him, cooking is not just a matter of preparing recipes, it is a total immersion in all things food. As he writes in his e-zine: “I’m obsessive. All my life, when something interested me, I became obsessed with it. I learned all I could about it. I lived it!”
Peter learned his cooking skills not in a classroom, but by working in restaurants, many with a Michelin star or two, in France and Switzerland. Recently, he spent a few weeks in an old-time butcher shop breaking down sides of beef, pork, and lamb to better understand the process and improve his knowledge of animal anatomy. He is also an avid student of food history and cooking science.
Peter learned his cooking skills not in a classroom, but by working in restaurants, many with a Michelin star or two, in France and Switzerland. Recently, he spent a few weeks in an old-time butcher shop breaking down sides of beef, pork, and lamb to better understand the process and improve his knowledge of animal anatomy. He is also an avid student of food history and cooking science.
REVIEWS
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The chef’s knife is the workhorse of the kitchen’s armamentarium. In my kitchen, it is the knife I use 90 to 95 percent of the time for the myriad of cutting jobs that meal preparation involves. My motto when it comes to chef’s knives is that “bigger is better (or at least more useful).” A chef’s knife with 10-inch long blade will make the cutting of large items easier because there is enough blade to allow you to effectively slice (think of always cutting with a sawing motion) back and forth as you cut. For small items only a portion of the blade is required, and depending upon what you are cutting, you’ll only use the tip, the center, or the heel of the cutting edge. You may think that a smaller chef’s knife is safer and easier to use, but my experience during knife skills classes has been that when using the proper pinch grip, students, even those with small hands, become quite comfortable with this big knife after an hour or so of use. Safety, as with any knife, comes from keeping the blade sharp and using it correctly. There are many well-known professional chefs that prefer a shorter 8-inch blade, but I have found the longer blade to be more versatile.Read More »
You can spend hundreds of dollars on a good chef’s knife. The more expensive examples usually have fancier handles and blades made from steel that will hold an edge longer. From a use standpoint, the appearance of the handle is unimportant. The handle must feel good in your hand, or at least in your middle, ring, and pinky fingers since your thumb and forefinger will be pinching the blade with the classic “pinch grip” that chefs use with most knives, but how it looks does not matter while you are slicing. -
There are two different styles of knives labeled “paring knives”. There’s the paring knife that serves as the one-size-fits-all utility knife in the kitchen, and there’s the true paring knife that’s used for certain smaller tasks that a chef’s knife is too big for. The first type has a longer blade and is rarely used for paring because it is too big to comfortably hold in your hand with a choke grip. The second type has a shorter blade and can be easily held with a choke grip or a pinch grip as is required for the cutting task at hand.Read More »
Because I use a paring knife as an addition to my large chef’s knife, I prefer to have one with as short a blade as possible. Also, since I’m using a paring knife mostly with a choke grip where I have one or two fingers wrapped around the blade, the handle should be a light as possible and hopefully short. I never grip my paring knife like sword so the actual feel of the handle is not very important to me.
The best paring knives are made from steel that is the same as used in high-quality chef’s knives. This steel can be sharpened to a very keen edge and that edge will last a long time. A sharp paring knife is a safe paring knife. -
Santoku-style knives are certainly an example of “what goes around comes around”. The santoku was originally a Japanese version of the common European chef’s knife. Today, most santoku knives available outside of Japan are non-Japanese versions of the Japanese santoku. Just as the Japanese santoku is quite different from a European chef’s knife, the non-Japanese santoku is quite different from the Japanese santoku.Read More »
Non-Japanese santokus generally have “sheep’s foot” profile and were originally likened to a Chinese vegetable cleaver with the end of the spine curved rather than squared-off. But unlike the Chinese cleaver, most santoku designs leave the tip of the cutting edge to end at a sharp, acute angle. This causes the tip to catch on your cutting board if you attempt to cut with a rocking motion. For this reason, you must hold a santoku so the edge is close to parallel with your cutting board when you slice with it.
Many of the manufacturers of non-Japanese santokus have designed their blades to be thinner than a similar-sized chef’s knife. This causes the knife to feel lighter in your hand. This is perceived as a benefit by people who prefer a santoku over a chef’s knife.
Also, many santoku designs incorporate grantons. These depressions ground in the sides of the blade help reduce surface tension when you slice through dense, moist vegetables, like a potato. Some manufacturers label a blade with grantons as being “hollow-ground,” but this term actually refers to a method of making inexpensive knife edges, not to grantons. The benefit of grantons on a wide-bladed knife, such as a santoku, is debatable.
High-end santokus are made with the same blade manufacturing techniques as high-end chef’s knives except that many are ground to the tighter bevel common with Japanese knives.
