Recommend me a chef's knife

Or worse, you only use to cut open ready frozen meals.

What good is a Chef's knife if you can't cook for shit?

Threaten a cook into your kitchen?

Let's take it to the bridge...

Good pub, I could just neck a pint.

I quite enjoyed watching these sharpening videos.
This morning I practiced till both my thumbs started bleeding.

http://www.chefknivestogo.com/knife-sharpening-tutorials.html

What good is a Chef's knife if you can't cook for shit?

As food is digested and it's remains appear from our bodies as fecal matter, you could say we all cook for shit.

Threaten a cook into your kitchen?

Take it to the bridge. >>>>>>>>>>>>

As food is digested and it's remains appear from our bodies as fecal matter, you could say we all cook for shit.

Fact.

You need to watch violinists, they can be vicious.

^This.

I should know, my girlfriend is one

Snap

Pluck

String quartet in the making.

http://www.aldi.co.uk/uk/html/offers/special_buys3_18665.htm

cheap ceramic knife,

Went to a shop to try out some of the zwilling knifes, so far the Santoku felt best

I'm mainly cooking vegetarian with the odd fish thrown in (proper fish knife is next on the list), so it'll be used for a lot of veg chopping etc. Good choice?

nice one, all I know is the steel is top quality

Henckels Four Star - easily the best value for money range, and with handles that are built to be used, not to look nice.

yes, good point, they were just as nice as the more expensive version

so this instead

also tried this

but found the blade to be too shallow

there was a programme on last night showing how they made the kyocera ceramic knives an old japanese sushi chef put one through it's paces wafer thin slices of fish he smiled and bowed low to the camera.. i presume that means he liked it ?
QI

Always worth checking in TK Max for knives, and other cooking stuff - i got a Wurth set for about 30% of the RRP

I'm no knife expert but I love my global G5.
the water-sharpening thing makes it easy to keep sharp as I don't have the skills on a stone.

My local butcher in Aus put me onto the Victorinox Fibrox knives

The steel is as good as anything, the handles are tough and actually fit your hand (unlike Global and other hipster knives), they are balanced and nice to use..........and only cost about £25 each. I've had one for 3 years and it's still going strong.

Richard Sheffield Balance

Got a full set of these including steel, cleaver, carving fork and bread knife from TK a few years ago for about £10 each

cheap!

http://store.makro.co.uk/showproduct.aspx?ProductID=4150&SEName=henckels-four-star-santoku-knife-18cm

From Antony Bourdain's excellent Kitchen Confidential (amazing book about food and the life of a chef).

How to Cook Like the Pros Unless you're one of us already, you'll probably never cook like a professional. And that's okay. On my day off, I rarely want to eat restaurant food unless I'm looking for new ideas or recipes to steal. What I want to eat is home cooking, somebody's - anybody's - mother's or grandmother's food. A simple pasta pomodoro made with love, a clumsily thrown-together tuna casserole, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, all of this is pure exotica to me, even when I've been neck-deep all day in filet mignon and herb-infused oils and all the bits of business we do to distinguish restaurant food from what you get at home. My mother-in-law would always apologize before serving dinner when I was in attendance, saying, 'This must seem pretty ordinary for a chef . . .' She had no idea how magical, how reassuring, how pleasurable her simple meat loaf was for me, what a delight even lumpy mashed potatoes were - being, as they were, blessedly devoid of truffles or truffle oil.
Let's talk about tools first. What do we have in our kitchens that you probably don't? The joke is that many of our stock items - herb oils, crushed spices, chiffonaded parsley, pured starches and veggies - are often made with home-model equipment, just like yours. I may have a 25-quart professional Hobart mixer and an ultra-large Robot-Coupe, but chances are I used a home blender to make that lovely roast red pepper coulis dotted with bright green basil oil drizzled around your plate. So, what do you absolutely need?

You need, for God's sake, a decent chef's knife. No con foisted on the general public is so atrocious, so wrongheaded, or so widely believed as the one that tells you you need a full set of specialized cutlery in various sizes. I wish sometimes I could go through the kitchens of amateur cooks everywhere just throwing knives out from their drawers - all those medium-size 'utility' knives, those useless serrated things you see advertised on TV, all that hard-to-sharpen stainless-steel garbage, those ineptly designed slicers - not one of the damn things could cut a tomato. Please believe me, here's all you will ever need in the knife department: ONE good chef's knife, as large as is comfortable for your hand. Brand name? Okay, most talented amateurs get a boner buying one of the old-school professional high-carbon stainless knives from Germany or Austria, like a Henkel or Wusthof, and those are fine knives, if heavy. High carbon makes them slightly easier to sharpe! n, and stainless keeps them from getting stained and corroded. They look awfully good in the knife case at the store, too, and you send the message to your guests when flashing a hundred-dollar hunk of Solingen steel that you take your cooking seriously. But do you really need something so heavy? So expensive? So difficult to maintain (which you probably won't)? Unless you are really and truly going to spend fifteen minutes every couple of days working that blade on an oiled carborundum stone, followed by careful honing on a diamond steel, I'd forgo the Germans.
Most of the professionals I know have for years been retiring their Wusthofs and replacing them with the lightweight, easy-to-sharpen and relatively inexpensive vanadium steel Global knives, a very good Japanese product which has - in addition to its many other fine qualities - the added attraction of looking really cool.
Global makes a lot of knives in different sizes, so what do you need? One chef's knife. This should cut just about anything you might work with, from a shallot to a watermelon, an onion to a sirloin strip. Like a pro, you should use the tip of the knife for the small stuff, and the area nearer the heel for the larger. This isn't difficult; buy a few rutabagas or onions - they're cheap - and practice on them. Nothing will set you apart from the herd quicker than the ability to handle a chef's knife properly. If you need instruction on how to handle a knife without lopping off a finger, I recommend Jacques Pepin's La Technique.

Okay, there are a couple of other knives you might find useful. I carry a flexible boning knife, also made by the fine folks at Global, because I fillet the occasional fish, and because with the same knife I can butcher whole tenderloins, bone out legs of lamb, French-cut racks of veal and trim meat. If your butcher is doing all the work for you you can probably live without one. A paring knife comes in handy once in a while, if you find yourself tourneing vegetables, fluting mushrooms and doing the kind of microsurgery that my old pal Dimitri used to excel at. But how often do you do that?

A genuinely useful blade, however, and one that is increasingly popular with my cronies in the field, is what's called an offset serrated knife . It's basically a serrated knife set into an ergonomic handle; it looks like a 'Z' that's been pulled out and elongated. This is a truly cool item which, once used, becomes indispensable. As the handle is not flush with the blade, but raised away from the cutting surface, you can use it not only for your traditional serrated blade needs - like slicing bread, thick-skinned tomatoes and so on - but on your full line of vegetables, spuds, meat and even fish. My sous-chef uses his for just about everything. F. Dick makes a good one for about twenty-five bucks. It's stainless steel, but since it's serrated it doesn't really matter; after a couple of years of use, if the teeth start to wear down, you just buy yourself another one.

^ interesting

still doesn't change the fact that Global's handles feel too small, at least for my hands

Probably not much use to anyone here but today I went out to an area called Kappabashadori in Tokyo and treated myself to a nice new handmade Japanese number:

I'm a very happy chappie now :) I've used a Global G-5 which is a similar shape for years now and I think it's a brilliant all round knife for everyday use.

I was looking for a decent knife primarily for chopping veg and thought that a Santoku was the best fit. The guy at the Japanese Kife company suggested I was better off with a Nakiri and I ended up with this - http://www.japaneseknifecompany.com/KNIVES/SINGLELAYERHIGHCARBONSTEEL/BRIETOGRANTONCOLLECTION/NAKIRIFRUITVEGETABLEKNIFE170MM/tabid/451/Default.aspx
So far it's been ridiculously impressive and if cared for, should last a long long time.

I'd advise you to call into them, they're really helpful and have food / chopping board in shop so you can see the knives in action. Plus they encourage you to come back with your knife for sharpening tutorials.