Your Expert Guide to Knives, Sharpening & Kitchen Blades in the UK
A VG-10 steel chef’s knife is a kitchen blade built around a core of Japanese high-carbon stainless steel, developed by Takefu Special Steel. It contains roughly 1% carbon and 15% chromium, and it is typically hardened to about 60-61 HRC. That combination gives you a keener edge than most Western stainless, without the rust drama … Read more
What is a Damascus steel knife block set? It is a matched collection of kitchen knives whose blades carry a rippled, water-like pattern from layered steel, sold with a wooden, bamboo or magnetic block for storage. On modern kitchen knives, that pattern usually comes from a hard core steel wrapped in softer layered cladding. That … Read more
Stand in front of any decent kitchen shop display and you’ll notice the same thing happening every time: hands go straight for the blade with the swirling, water-like pattern down the steel. That’s the pull of a damascus steel chef’s knife, and it’s not just about looks. Underneath that pattern sits a genuinely different way … Read more
A Damascus knife set is a collection of kitchen knives — typically a chef’s knife, santoku, paring knife and often more — forged or clad from multiple layers of steel, producing both a distinctive wavy or swirling surface pattern and, when done properly, a harder, longer-lasting edge than a single sheet of ordinary stainless steel. … Read more
There’s a particular kind of kitchen despair that comes from sawing at a tomato with a blade that gave up its edge sometime around 2019. You press harder, the tomato collapses into a juicy mess, and you wonder why chopping vegetables suddenly feels like a wrestling match. A ceramic knife set exists precisely to end … Read more
Picture a blade that glides through a ripe tomato as if the skin were a polite suggestion. It never rusts, it never leaves a metallic whiff on an onion, and it feels featherlight in your hand. That’s the sales pitch for a ceramic chef’s knife. Most of it holds up, provided you read the small … Read more
Picture a ripe tomato. Skin drum-tight, flesh slightly wobbly. Now picture a blunt steel knife approaching it. You know how this ends: squashed, weepy, a small kitchen tragedy before supper. A ceramic knife for vegetables rewrites that story. The blade is so fine and so hard that it glides through tomato skin, courgette, cucumber and … Read more
A carbon steel knife set is a collection of kitchen knives forged from high-carbon steel (rather than fully stainless alloys), prized for taking a keener edge and being easier to resharpen, at the cost of needing a bit more day-to-day care. That trade-off — savage sharpness for a little extra washing-up diligence — is really … Read more
Ask any chef who’s spent a decade behind a board what separates a knife they merely own from one they actually reach for at 6am, and the answer usually has nothing to do with branding. It’s the steel. A carbon steel chef’s knife for professionals isn’t a trend piece or a kitchen ornament — it’s … Read more
Somewhere between your nan’s battered old cook’s knife and the £300 Japanese blade your foodie mate won’t shut up about, there’s a whole world of carbon steel kitchen knives that most home cooks in Britain simply never try. Which is a shame, because once you’ve felt what an actual sharp edge feels like — the … Read more