You may not need a giant chef’s knife when a medium-sized knife will do the job

Kitchen knives are Very personal. You can do almost everything you need in the kitchen with a chef’s knife, paring knife, and bread knife. But the more time you spend in the kitchen, the more you develop preferences, and soon it becomes more like n+1, and there you are, thinking about the cleaver.

There is a lot of space between most chef knives and paring knives. What’s in that space — often called small, prep, or utility knives — is often pretty weird. Consider the knives you never use out of a group, and you’ll likely consider short, serrated knives or small knives that don’t have room for your fingers between the handle and cutting board.

What if you’re a smaller person, have smaller hands, or just think a smaller but high-performance all-around knife might be your jam? What if the right version of those medium-sized knives actually turned out to be useful?

My pleasure is that the good ones are. With equal parts luck, research, and trial and error, I found new and current but fly-under-the-radar examples of mid-sized knives that were wonderfully functional, in part due to their size. The right people are incredibly helpful and great people are beasts of prep.

Messermeister Kawashima knife.

Courtesy of Messermeister

Recently I saw signs at my favorite trade show that I might be on to something. In the Messermeister knife stand, a medium-sized blade stood out thanks to an olive wood handle and interesting geometry. It felt balanced and comfortable with room for hands of any size to move back on the handle, or forward in a pinch grip. Most importantly, there was plenty of clearance, so the knuckles didn’t hit the cutting board at the bottom of the strike. I kept my eyes open, and saw more potential from Cangshan, Tarerias-Pongan, and Xueling. This got me thinking. I remembered the Wusthöf Classic chef’s knife that comes in a 5-inch size. Likewise, I was hoping I could find a short version of a smart Japanese knife called the Kiritsuke and contact the good folks at Knife Seisuke in Portland, Oregon.

Soon I had a stack of beautiful knives on my cutting board. I put my knives in my knife roll for storage, and used the new, smaller specimens for weeks as my daily driver.

The more I use it, the more I understand what I want. First, I threw their unhelpful names out the window: trivial, useful, prep… whatever. Next, I decided that my beautiful Tadafusa Santoku knives, the shortest of my long knives, would be the longest I would cut at about 6.5 inches. Having these knives “do it all” seemed like a stretch, but they definitely needed to be able to do a lot more. I was willing to work with the knife to find its strengths, but I preferred something that could handle different cutting styles and all types of food. They had to be prep monsters.