Six Inches Is More Than Enough: The Standard Size For Chef’s Knives Should Not Be 8 Inches
Let’s get one thing out of the way. If you are a professional chef, you will benefit from weilding a larger knife in the kitchen. With a skilled user, the extra weight of the knife make it easier to slice through ingredients. Somewhat counter-intuitively, that means that over the long periods of use the knife is actually less fatiguing to use than a smaller knife, where you are not getting as much cutting power from the wrist. Indeed, if you were to walk into a professional kitchen right now, you would see most chefs using a knife that is between 8 and 12 inches
That’s great, most of us are not professional chefs!
- Most of us are cooking dinner for 1-4 people and rarely will need to chop anything for more than 10 minutes at a time
- Most of us are working on crowded cutting boards and could benefit from a more nimble knife
- Most of us don’t have amazing knife skills (help with that here). And everyone, from the chef to the home cook just getting their start in the kitchen, is more precise with a smaller knife
Knife companies should promote knives that work for the most of us! Instead of putting an 8 inch chef’s knife in the block, we can do 6 inches. I’d be happy to comprise on 7 inches? I have a pet theory that part of the reason Santoku knives took off in the US were because they were the only widely full-size knives that were smaller than 8 inches. Let’s give the people what they don’t know they want yet, Steven Jobs-style
Before owning a 6 inch chef’s knife myself, I was certain that it’d be too small to do everything I needed it to do. I blame it on subliminal messaging from big knife. I mean, why else are they handing home cooks swords? I remember distinctly thinking that that it definitely wouldn’t be able to cut through a big onion. It turns out, that was one of more joyous ingredients to process with a 6 inch knife.
As you can see from the above photo, 6 inches is more than long enough to get through an onion. I personally only feel the need to reach for a knife larger than 7 inch es(a size I’d suggest as heartily as 6 inches but is a bit more rare) if I’m processing something very large like a cabbage or a lot of tough vegetables like potatoes.
The beauty of the smaller knife is its versatility. When prepping a small or medium-sized meal, it’s much more appealing to reach for the 6 inch knife which excels at both medium items and small items. I cook with a lot of fresh garlic, chili and ginger; a smaller knife makes handling those ingredients very easy. I also find the smaller chef knives easier to use when deboning a fish or a chicken. And while it is true that a larger knife can reduce cutting fatigue over work shift, over a short stint in the kitchen, a smaller lighter knife feels much easier to use
So this is my plea to the knife industry, if they are listening, which they are most certainly not. Let’s lower the standard chef’s knife size to 6 or 7 inches, for the sake of the home cook
CutleryAndMore.com has a sale on knives right now. I’ve listed some of my favorites here. Give one a shot or bless someone in your life during the upcoming holidays. They’ll think of you every time they pick it up
