[kwiens]

Agree. It's kind of like a chef's knife: a better tool makes you a better chef.

A sharp knife is also quite a bit safer than a dull knife. By heating to operating temperature in 5 seconds and rapidly pouring heat into the material, you don't have to hold the hot iron as long. As soon as you're done, pop on the safety cap and instantly shield the hot metal.

Soldering isn't remotely mainstream, and part of that is the quality of tools. We set out to streamline the entire process to make soldering as accessible as possible.

[mauvehaus]

For all edge tools be they for cooking, woodworking, forestry or something else: buy steel, not sharp. Henkels, Lie-Nielsen, Gransfors Bruk, Victorinox, or Stanley is only going to sharpen it for you once.

Corollary: learn to sharpen. The best steel in the world isn't going to cut anything if it's dull.

For the record, I sharpen chisels almost daily and I hate sharpening kitchen knives. The carbides set at the right angle in the handle you pull down the length of the blade will keep your knives a lot sharper than a set of Japanese water stones you never use.

[Kon-Peki]

If you live in a reasonably large metro area that has a lot of good restaurants, there is going to be a small handful of cooking knife sharpeners. A large percentage of professional chefs can't afford/justify good quality sharpening equipment for something that they use a couple times per year.

They'll take their knives to these services and pay $5 or $6 per knife, and it will get done to perfection in just a few minutes while they wait. You can use these same services, there is no membership card needed to get in the door.

[mauvehaus]

I live at the literal end of the internet: there are no more poles beyond our house. Surprisingly, one of the hardware stores in the area has a robot knife sharpener. I'm tempted to try it, but the only time I remember is when I'm already there without a knife!

When we were still in the Boston area, a lot of the hardware stores and farmers markets would have a knife sharpening service come one day a month.

[Kon-Peki]

I’ve been told to stay away from any kind of sharpening that isn’t specifically for cooking knives - the angle of the blade is supposed to be different.

I don’t have actual knowledge, just what I’ve been told by chefs.

[dpedu]

I am completely confused by your example. Buying a better knife doesn't make you a better chef. Buying a faster car doesn't make you a better driver. Buying a more powerful laptop doesn't make you a better developer.

[Larrikin]

Do you cook? There are dozens of obvious examples. A crappy knife will tear instead of cut. You'll ruin tomatoes, have uneven dices, crush and smear delicate herbs, have ripped apart meat and fish that you'll destroy more trying to get rid of the trim. That's not counting the downtime you'll have when the knife slips instead of cuts and you can't cook at all due to injury.

Giving an expensive knife to a new cook that has never cooked before will not make them a Michelin chef, but their progress will be faster when they don't have the knife working against them.

[Kon-Peki]

> Giving an expensive knife to a new cook that has never cooked before will not make them a Michelin chef

Pick any Michelin-rated restaurant at random and visit the kitchen. You'll find plenty of $50 knives in use. It doesn't take a lot of money to build a good-enough-for-world-class-cooking knife. Once you get beyond a certain price point, it's mostly about personal preferences and "situations that apply to me but may or may not apply to you".

[cthalupa]

Hmm. I'm far from an expert, but I have seen chefs at work in person in about a dozen michelin star places over the years, and in videos/books/etc. of many more. My anecdotal experiences have lead me to believe that no, the knives they use for the majority of tasks day in and day out are not $50 knives. They might have some cheaper knives (usually victorinox from what I've seen) for specific purposes but when it came to chef's knives/gyutos, they were all more expensive. Not necessarily super expensive - I've seen tons of Globals, Macs, and Misonos over the years and their stuff is more like the $150-$200ish range. But I've also seen people with high-end small production Japanese blacksmiths, too.

[Kon-Peki]

Fair enough :)

I'll just point out that your standard workhorse Global 8" is easily available for $80ish. Probably even cheaper in Japan with the exchange rates.

[spookie]

Fair enough, but for anyone wondering, you can make a shit knife shine if you take good care of it! Sharpening it, using a chef's honing steel in between some harder cuts to take care of those nasty burrs and you're off to the races!

[bigstrat2003]

I cook, and I disagree with the assertion that a better knife makes you a better cook. Good knives are useful, but ultimately you're still going to produce crappy results if you're a bad cook with a good knife.

[willcipriano]

A bad dull knife bruises and smashes more than it cuts. If a first time cook was making a salsa, the one made with the good knife would be better as the tomatoes would be juicer and not all smushed.

[chipsrafferty]

Use a serrated knife.

[willcipriano]

A dull serrated knife does the same thing.

[mensetmanusman]

A better cook will want sharper knives.

A better cook knows that if her knives are dull, she won’t perform as well.

[chipsrafferty]

So untrue.

The only thing a better knife does is save you prep time. Being a good cook is about understanding how different materials cook, when different foods are "done", how flavors work together, and how to improvise when things go outside the plan/recipe or adapt to novel situations.

Cutting technique is only important if you're a professional chef with actual time constraints and can't afford to spend an extra 30 seconds cutting an onion.

[xxs]

While I do agree - you can (or should be able to) get any knife to shave. They may lack edge retention or proper geometry but slicing/cutting/chopping is doable with pretty much any knife, as long as you can sharpen them. I'd say getting any knife to cut tomatoes flawlessly with just a brick and some water is not a hard task.

That being said, I still prefer diamond stones (sharpening wise)

[chipsrafferty]

I have a ~80 dollar knife that is dull as an EA and you're vastly exaggerating.

Tomatoes, meat, fish, I use my $4 serrated knife. Everything else is fine. With proper technique it's basically impossible to cut yourself even with a very dull knife.

[dpedu]

I don't cook, but I solder. And I got a lot of mileage out of a dirt cheap Radio Shack iron. Well, I do cook, but I'm not into it or as skilled at it to the degree I am with soldering.

[lttlrck]

Now you've introduced "expensive" muddying the argument even more :-)

[rsch]

That is a common fallacy, I suspect it comes from having enough budget to not having to think about being able to afford something decent.

It is like photographers with $5,000 worth of equipment in their camera bags telling you that equipment doesn’t matter. I mean, there is a reason why they spend all that money right? Of course a good photographer will be able to get good results with a cheap camera, but only in situations where that cheap camera can actually capture the scene. For example, if it is not sensitive enough to capture enough light at night time, you are not getting night time shots, period, no matter how good you are. (this very much used to be a thing 10 years ago)

If you employ programmers, you will buy fast workstations because it will make them MUCH more productive. A slow computer will interrupt your work by making you wait.

I think it is in fact the exact opposite, the better you are at something, the more likely it is that you become limited by your equipment. I will probably not be able to cook better if I get very expensive knives. But I would speculate that an actual professional cook or butcher will be able to work better with sharp knives that keep their edges well.

[chrismorgan]

Programmers are also frequently better equipped to make underpowered machines work for them, by adjusting their techniques, monitoring resource usage and stopping or uninstalling things like bloatware. Whereas normal people will tend to struggle if they just buy the cheapest machine they can find.

[cthalupa]

The problem is that bad tools can be a limiting factor, regardless of skill level. The more skilled you are the more likely you are able to compensate for bad tools, but you'd still be more productive with good ones.

A knife that won't hold it's edge will mean you are explicitly going to perform worse as a chef - you will get ragged cuts, you will be more at risk for injuring yourself, etc.

A slow laptop will mean you learn more slowly - doubly so if you are working with compiled languages or anything where you spend significant processing time before determining the outcome of whatever you're working on. The quicker you can get feedback on your work, be it from compilation errors, manual review of the output, your tests running, etc., the more you get to iterate and the more you get to learn.

A cheap soldering iron explicitly can make soldering more difficult and result in worse outcomes, particularly for a beginner.

Be it cooking, soldering, photographing, programming, whatever, there is frequently a point where going from a cheaper tool to a more expensive one will make the life of a beginner easier and let them produce better outcomes. As you get more skilled you can learn how to more quickly and easily sharpen knives, or produce fewer bugs in your code, or how to better handle aperture vs. ISO or whatever. But in those cases there will still often be productivity/efficiency gains from using nicer tools

[jpalawaga]

no, but with a shitty laptop it can be hard to be a good developer. having dull knives will make cooking experience, slow, dangerous, and unpleasant. having a boat-car will make it difficult to practice any sort of skilled driving.

it's not that you can't overcome adversity and do the thing anyhow, but you're certainly not making it easy. In all cases, using the proper tool allows you to remove the extra difficulty factor and focus on that task at hand.

But also, cutting a tomato with a sharp knife is way, way easier than with a dull knife. Same with soldering. Ignores the rest of the parts of being a chef, but you get the comparison.

[belthesar]

"Better" is definitely the wrong word, but the jist is sound with the right framing. A better tool often allows you to do work safer, and that is what was attempted to be conveyed. Applying the approach to one of your examples, a faster car doesn't make you a better driver, but a car with more safety features makes your driving experience safer than one with less.

[lelandfe]

My dull chef's knife got caught when I chopping an onion and nearly lopped my fingertip off. I was not a very good chef that night.

[dpedu]

I'm not sure what that has to do with better vs worse tools. Expensive knives get dull too. Good chefs, on the other hand, keep their equipment in working order regardless of its value.

[lelandfe]

A dull knife is a worse tool.

You’re getting awfully literal, though.

[xxs]

So you are saying tool maintenance (well any maintenance) is important?