Horses for courses: living with a (new) japanese knife

The Victorinox is either a "Victorinox Forged" and is a German knife like all other high-end German knives; or it's a Forschner Rosewood or Fibrox, in which case it's a lightweight, stamped knife; and takes an edge better than more expensive Germans (it's Swiss, I knos), but is decidedly almost whippy feeling.

The Sab presumably started as 25 or 25,5cm. I don't believe any Sabatier manufacturer every made a 24cm knife, at least not intentionally. Any time you see a length which is a function of 30cm, it's probably a function of the Japanese "sun" unit of measurement.

You like short knives, don't you?

There are limits to how sharp you can get the German and the Victorinox/Forschner. The Sabatier can be made quite sharp. If you want to embark on a voyage of knife skill improvement, sharpening is the best place to start.

Congratulations. Use it in good health.

While you're there, get some better waterstones too.

Misono 440s are chippy. It's not so much a result of "hardness" per se, but more the result of lack of toughness.

"Stiff" and "thin" are relative terms. Your Misono is fairly stiff as gyutos in its price group go, but not compared to an ordinary European forged knife like your Sabatier. As Japanese knives go, it's not particularly thin.

Forschner/Victorinox sharpen pretty well for Euro-stainless, but they lose their edges very quckly too. The Sabatier can take a lot of sharpening and the edge will wear a long time, but the knife needs a lot of steeling between sharpenings. The better the "steel" (rod-hone) and the technique used along with it, the better the edge quality. Unfortnately, your Sab's edge sounds as though it may be somewhat compromised to begin with by your limitations as a sharpener.

I wouldn't expect the Misono to get much sharper than the Sabatier if the Sab were appropriate thinned and bevelled; but would expect it to need less steeling.

You don't want to slam the Misono into the board. So avoid tasks which force the knife into cutting through something very tough that isn't sitting square and flat -- things like squash roots, cutting through pineapple, cutting the knuckles off chicken legs, etc.

If you can't use your chef's knife to chop parsley, it isn't much of a chef's knife.

As I understand it, you chiffonade the parsley before chopping? Where did you learn that? Also, there's no need to turn the knife "sidewise," before chopping. There's a tendency to "walk" the knife through herbs while holding the tip with the off-hand. Try to avoid that as it tends to torque the edge when it's buried in the board; and that tends to chip it.

Cut the bones out of "meat which might have bones," so it's "meat which might not have bones," and you'll be OK. Don't use your Misono to cut through bones -- for instance, the feather bones or the chine when carving a rack of lamb. It wouldn't be my first choice for going through cartilage to trim a rack of spare ribs either.

As a hobby knives? Sure. To actually use? No. Each of these knives has a definite purposes which probably don't coincide with how you cook; and neither is easy to learn. If you want to be a better cook, they are each a waste of time. If you want to cook like a traditional Japanese cook, than they are both essential.

It's almost entirely about the first parts of preparing fish. Some boney. No mince. No chop.

"Right hands" are the operative words. Yours are not among them, unless you choose to make them so and are willing to put in the practice to do so. If you don't have excellent knife skills with a chef's knife, you're unlikely to develop them with a usuba.

Yes.

The differences are mostly regional, but the kamagata usuba is a little better suited for point work.

Sorry, no. I haven't.

No.

That's because they clean their knives sooner and more completely than you do yours. Yours can be restored quite easily if you care to do so.

If you're talking about a traditional, chisel edged deba -- then no way. If you're talking about a "V" edged yo-deba, then maybe. However, your German knife, other than being too short, is a lot tougher than most yo-debas and better suited to most yo-deba tasks at least as a westerner would undertake them, than a good yo-deba. You certainly don't need an alloy hardened to more than 60HrC to split chickens -- in fact it's something of a handicap. On the other hand, an edge which takes a lot of abuse and then can be restored on a steel is a wonderful thing.

A lot to chew on,
BDL

Yup, I'm the "usuba argh" guy.

Couple brief notes.

1. Usuba. Don't go there. Expensive, pain in the butt, and totally useless when paired with French/German knife forms. Brilliant knife for what it is, but to really master it will take several years during which you will essentially never be able to allow yourself to use any kind of chef's knife/gyuto.

2. Deba. BDL is, quite unusually, wrong for once. A deba is certainly used for mincing and chopping. BUT in order to do this, you'd need to buy a fairly big one -- at least 195mm and preferably more like 210. Then you have to back-bevel the heelmost third of the blade just a little bit so it can take the blows. Having done that, you're all set for hand-mincing and chopping. But unless you deal with whole fish on a fairly regular basis, this is a silly knife to buy just for the mincing.

I don't like debas for chopping. They're fine I suppose if you're chopping stuff randomly but they steer too much to use that way, IMO.

We may mean something different by "chopping." I mean essentially coarse mincing. I'm talking about a kind of chopping that honestly cannot be done with an usuba (assuming you don't want to totally screw up the edge).

Okay, that would work fine.

I stand corrected. The guy I learned pretty much everything I know about traditional Japanese knife technique (which isn't much) is an outstanding technician, but is just one guy. In his restaurant, most chopping prep work was done in the kitchen and/or during the day with chef's knives/gyutos. This included just about everything but fish and sush/sashimi mise. If there were mise chopping to be done at the bar in the evening he used a usuba, and a chef's during the day. Paranthetically, different day and evening knife sets for up-front cutting is not that unusual in Southern California sushi-ya. The only deba chopping I witnessed was negi-toro.

It seems I over-generalized.

BDL