MMmmm, You shouldn't--actually don't need to-"hack through" bones. Find the joint with the soft cartlidge(sp?) and cut through. Chomping through a piece of chicken and spitting out bone fragments isn't all that nice, cut through the joint and you don't have this problem.
For stuff like cutting cabbage, I prefer a strong knife with a thick spine--no hocus-pocus with cutting angles or metal ingredients-- it's just that a thick spine is easier for me to push down with my other hand when I'm chopping through cabbage or squash.
So as you're learning all about knives remember the basics:
1) A knife with a shallow blade angle (bevel), say 25 degrees, is "strong like bull" but not all that sharp. I mean it's sharp, but with such an angle it acts more like a wedge or axe than a knife. This is not neccesarily a bad thing for dense foods like vegetables, but not all that nice for delidate stuff like meats.
2) Don't get too hung up on metal hardness (Rockwell hardness). True, the harder the metal, the better it keeps it's edge, but also the more brittle or fragile it is. If you've ever dropped a file on a cement floor, you know that it will shatter. Soft metal bends easier, but can be brought back into shape with a steel, and it also takes less time and effort to get a new edge on it when you use abrasives. So it's 6 of one, and a half-dozen of the other. The more you read and learn about metals, the more you find out that there will always be trade-offs and compromises in each type of alloy.
3) Expensive does not neccesarily mean good. A $300 knife will not give you excellent results--it will give you clean cuts, but it is YOUR eye-hand coordination that will give you the nice looking stuff. In other words, practice makes perfect.
4) When you sharpen--and here I mean using abrasives to establish a new edge--the rule of thumb is that the finer the abrasive you use, the better and longer lasting the edge is. Some go down as far as 8000-1200 grit range, which will give a mirror polish.  |