Knife Skills —

a kitchen guide to using the right knife the right way

This site will give you the confidence to choose and use the knives and other nonelectric sharp tools in your kitchen. It’s also a reference site that you can use as you improve your skills and acquire the tools that will make you a better cook!

Mezzaluna

A mezzaluna is a mostly single-purpose tool. Its use is for chopping herbs. With its rounded blade, it just needs a rocking motion, back and forth, to chop the herbs as finely as you’d like. Mezzalunas are available with either one or two blades. As a professional chef, I’ve never felt the need to use one. Herbs chop quite easily with a chef’s knife. The main reason to buy a mezzaluna is if you’re chopping a mountain of herbs every day. It will make your task easier and faster.

Meat cleaver

Oyster, clam, and scallop knives

How to Choose and Use Your Knives

How to Buy a Knife

Caring for Your Knives

Nonknife, Nonmotorized Sharp Kitchen Tools

A false friend’s tongue is sharper than a knife.

If your mouth turns into a knife, it will cut off your lips.

The mother is she who catches the knife by the blade.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

John Owen

Temptation is like a knife, that may either cut the meat or the throat of a man; it may be his food or his), poison, his exercise or his destruction.

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The information in this site is true and complete to the best of our knowledge.
The author disclaims any liability in connection with the use of this information.
All recommendations are made without guarantee.