[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 :-)