Kitchen Knife Help

Hi Veeky Forums. I find cutting vegetables to be time-consuming (it takes me ~30 minutes to prepare a soffrito for a multi-meal dish) and I think it may be because I'm not using the right kind of knife. I don't have a real knife set, just a small serrated all-purpose knife. What's a good kind of kitchen knife for cutting vegetables? What should I look for in terms of length of blade, cut profile, etc?

You're never going to be able to work quickly with a serrated knife

Buy a cheapie chef knife from webstaurant store or a place like that, Dexter or something along those lines. Get a rough stone, 500 grit beston or similar. Learn to sharpen, and when sharpening too often becomes a pain in the ass, by then you'll have the maintenance skills to take care of a real knife made of good steel, and higher grit levels

just grab a chef's knife and a sharpener. It cuts everything you need.

Get a Victorinox.
You don't need anything more expensive at your stage of the game.

This.
Just don't pay too much for it. If they're above $40 you're being ripped off.

Just get a big cleaver. You can use it for everything, just check out asians

Some asians have a gazillion different knives.

>knife set
>fork

It identifies as a santoku, shitlord.

Of course, but I've known plenty who would do absolutely everything with the same cleaver - from meat to veg. You'd think it would be clunky but it turns out you can be pretty deft with a cleaver

I bought this Japanese vegetable knife off Amazon for about $18... lightweight, sharp as fuck, easy to handle... I grip it with a couple of fingers over the blade and my thumb behind it when I'm chopping vegetables. Excellent value IMHO.

You could use a 6" chef's knife and a 3" paring knife, maybe the serrated all-purpose knife for bread and tomatoes. A flexible boning knife if you need to take chickens apart. I have a 3" paring knife I've had since college, a cheap knife, but it takes a good edge and I like it, so its supermarket pedigree doesn't matter to me.

Here's the photo

Chef's Knife: excellent, all-purpose knife. If you only get one knife, make it a chef's knife. But don't get one with a bolster!
Gyuto: Japanese chef's knife, if you are a weeb. Thinner and sharper but harder to sharpen. Available in both western style and turbo-weeb style.

Cai Dao/Chinese Cleaver/Chinese Chef's Knife:
Slightly less all-purpose but excellent if you do a shit tonne of veg, good for chopping, scooping, rocking, et cetera. Cheap!

Santoku: multi-purpose knife for smaller kitchens, get this if you live in a tiny apartment and your cutting board is smaller than a dinner plate

Nakiri: specialized Japanese veg knife. A bit silly in this day and age, considered a professional tool for autistic chefs.

> just a small serrated all-purpose knife.

Serrated knives are shit. They're serrated because they're cheap and serrations are cheaper to put on a knife than a decent edge using decent steel.

They slow you down.

Get a chef's knife. That's all you need. Everything else is a meme. Don't buy a knife "set" whatever you do.

A slim knife for fileting is definitely not a meme.

While you can practically do everything with a chefs knife I'd still recommend a paring knife and a deboning knife as the essential additions to own.

>paying 3x extra for the shill endorsement

>Don't buy a knife "set" whatever you do.
It's not like those knives are bad by definition. They usually just offer a lot more stuff than you'll need.

>it's popular so you're supposed to hate it
fucking goths

Popularity should make the price go down. Like how actual high end knives are under $120 now and excellent budget knives are $60.

Paying extra for a low end knife is for retards.

>Popularity should make the price go down.
More demand causes prices to rise you goon. Try taking at least an online Econ 101 course before talking about prices.

Everyone laugh at the underachiever who didn't pay attention in class

Supply is not fixed, you fuckup

You're effectively arguing that iphone 1 prices should be higher today than in 2007 because more people want a smart phone

Victorinox Fibrox has gone up in price from about $27 three years ago to $40+ now after multiple endorsements from America's Test Kitchen.

It's definitely a meme knife, and Victorinox is definitely gouging people at this point.

ATK's approach to knife testing made a lot of sense in like 1999 when there were not that many interesting knives on the market. Back then if you wanted something thinner and harder than a German bone axe from Macy's, you had Global from Williams-Sonoma, and that was it. Otherwise it was Wusthof, Henckels, or modern Sab because vintage sabs weren't really commonly traded or sold on outside of extremely niche communities unlike now where multiple shops are offering NOS sabs in a variety of handles.

They've been too lazy to keep up, you can't realistically do a "top kitchen knives" test any longer, not in that style, because there's just way too much out there. Maybe, you can do "top 10 French-profile stainless 240mm laser western handle gyutos under $250" or something like that, but I have yet to see them try anything like that and their feeble attempts to keep up with the times have been an embarrassment. Take their "carbon knives" rundown for instance, they picked like 6 knives at random that had essentially nothing in common with one another, and they mixed up two of them in the final results.

Not to mention their tests never make any effort at measuring stuff that people who are actually in the market for an expensive knife might want to know about, like edge holding, stability, short to mid term performance after a short bout of use right after the finishing stones, etc. It's always just out of the box edges which nobody in his right mind would use as a basis for comparison.

Any time I hear someone recommending a knife on the basis of a 20 year old review, I know they don't have the slightest idea what they're talking about and they probably overpaid for a Fibrox recently.

I bought a chef's knife and vegetable knife from ikea (vorda series), they work great and cost next to nothing. I've been using the vegetable knife the most for the past half year, and besides a quick honing before use I haven't had to sharpen it yet.

>they mixed up two of them in the final results.

Which ones? Are you saying they confused the Kramer by Zwilling with the Togiharu?

>he fell for it

I think it was a Masamoto with a Togiharu but I cbf to look it up. One of them was in the $70 range and the other one was over $200, I remember that much.

>You used 1x damage control
>You were unsuccessful!

>They don't have the slightest idea what they're talking about.
>And I do.
While OP could spend his time listening to smug know-it-alls claiming popular things are shit, he would probably be helped a lot more if you could actually recommend a good alternative, preferably with some more support from trustworthy sources than "I, some random user, say so based on my self proclaimed awesomeness and therefor it is fact".

See my first post in the thread and stop being so salty that you got gouged by Victorinox. Many people have made far more expensive mistakes and recovered. It's just a knife, and not a bad knife either. Just way overpriced.

i'm not OP. should i buy a wetstone that has a different grit either side? should i bother with this level of sharpening?

thank you