- Joined
- Jul 4, 2012
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Hi, I'm new here. You'll find my intro in the New Member Checkin subforum (http://www.kitchenknifeforums.com/showthread.php/7334-Hello-from-Sonoma-County). In that thread, Johnny.B.Good expressed the hope that I would post some pictures of my cleavers and knives. Seems reasonable. Here they are. I have a lot of stories about many of these, but let's leave most of that for further discussions. I do want to call out the knives I'm not using much, though. Maybe someone can tell me what they're good for. Keep in mind that the vast majority of my cooking is Chinese.
This is my current go-to cleaver for anything and everything, a stainless steel Sugimoto. It's just thick and heavy enough to do the cleaver-chopping thing, but thin enough to make thin slices. It takes a remarkable edge and keeps it for a remarkably long time. I love it.
This is my other Sugimoto, a larger carbon steel cleaver that is, like the other Sugimoto, perfect for almost everything.
I think of this as my workhorse, a thinnish carbon steel cleaver I picked up on Shanghai St. in Hong Kong for $15 US. Not nearly the equal of the Sugimotos, but handy and useful, and if it does not keep an edge for long, it's nevertheless quite easy to restore one.
My previous go-to cleaver, before my incessant Googling for "Japanese-made Chinese cleaver" were rewarded with Sugimoto heaven. The Dexter. A bit on the thick side for my current tastes, but still a nice all-around cleaver.
Before the Dexter, there was...the Joyce Chen. She had a little restaurant in Cambridge, and her fame was sufficient to let her put her name on a cleaver. Not a bad cleaver, at all.
The Joyce Chen purchase worked out, so I tried another "signature" cleaver, the Judy Lew. Not much impressive steel there, but its light, thin structure has made it my wife's go-to-cleaver for random kitchen chopping. So not a total loss.
This was a custom cleaver. If pressed, I could probably sort out where I got it. It's a beauty, thin and long and light. The physics make it a bit fatiguing, and its thinness makes it not the sort of thing I want to be whacking into my chopping board at high speed, but I pull it out from time to time to make really thin cuts, or to cut really long things, and am delighted.
Here's the first tragedy of the collection, a cleaver I find stunningly beautiful, but useless. It's too curved on the bottom to work well with my style of working, and the smooth handle does not seat firmly in my hand, tending to twist. Can't use it. Sure is pretty, though.
I find cleavers preferable for almost everything. But sometimes, I need other knives. The most interesting case of that is when I need super-thin slices, especially from something that doesn't want to cooperate, like a room-temperature pork loin. That's when I want the thinnest knife I can come up with. Global's helpful here:
But so are the random Japanese sources I got these from.
The other big thing is boning. From the top:
- A basic Global boning knife. Very useful
- A French Ebay purchase, with some rust. Great knife. It's super-flexible, and I can get more fillet off of the bones of a fish than I can with anything else I've got.
- Another EBay purchase of unknown origins. It needed a lot of cleanup. But the thing is super-sharp, and I find it really useful for finding those places where the ligaments fall away, and the bones separate
- A Japanese "boning" knife, or so the site said. Seems like a great knife, but darned if I can find a use for it.
Like anyone else, I need to slice ham:
or cheese and bread:
But sometimes things get a little weird, and I find a need for a "bird" knife (to remove the bones from a chicken or duck the hard way, from the inside), or a total hacking knife, to do random tasks I don't want to waste my other knives on:
Then, finally, there is the art piece, a David Boye which I bought many years ago, not as art, but to use. Turns out I can't think of a darned thing I want to do with a chef's knife, that doesn't seem more sensible to do with a cleaver, or one of my others. The thing is beautiful, and different (that greasy texture of the dendritic steel is unique), and holds an edge like you wouldn't believe, but it's not for me, and I'm not really a collector type so I will probably sell it at some point. Have you seen what these things are selling for these days?
That's the collection. Hope you enjoyed.
This is my current go-to cleaver for anything and everything, a stainless steel Sugimoto. It's just thick and heavy enough to do the cleaver-chopping thing, but thin enough to make thin slices. It takes a remarkable edge and keeps it for a remarkably long time. I love it.
This is my other Sugimoto, a larger carbon steel cleaver that is, like the other Sugimoto, perfect for almost everything.
I think of this as my workhorse, a thinnish carbon steel cleaver I picked up on Shanghai St. in Hong Kong for $15 US. Not nearly the equal of the Sugimotos, but handy and useful, and if it does not keep an edge for long, it's nevertheless quite easy to restore one.
My previous go-to cleaver, before my incessant Googling for "Japanese-made Chinese cleaver" were rewarded with Sugimoto heaven. The Dexter. A bit on the thick side for my current tastes, but still a nice all-around cleaver.
Before the Dexter, there was...the Joyce Chen. She had a little restaurant in Cambridge, and her fame was sufficient to let her put her name on a cleaver. Not a bad cleaver, at all.
The Joyce Chen purchase worked out, so I tried another "signature" cleaver, the Judy Lew. Not much impressive steel there, but its light, thin structure has made it my wife's go-to-cleaver for random kitchen chopping. So not a total loss.
This was a custom cleaver. If pressed, I could probably sort out where I got it. It's a beauty, thin and long and light. The physics make it a bit fatiguing, and its thinness makes it not the sort of thing I want to be whacking into my chopping board at high speed, but I pull it out from time to time to make really thin cuts, or to cut really long things, and am delighted.
Here's the first tragedy of the collection, a cleaver I find stunningly beautiful, but useless. It's too curved on the bottom to work well with my style of working, and the smooth handle does not seat firmly in my hand, tending to twist. Can't use it. Sure is pretty, though.
I find cleavers preferable for almost everything. But sometimes, I need other knives. The most interesting case of that is when I need super-thin slices, especially from something that doesn't want to cooperate, like a room-temperature pork loin. That's when I want the thinnest knife I can come up with. Global's helpful here:
But so are the random Japanese sources I got these from.
The other big thing is boning. From the top:
- A basic Global boning knife. Very useful
- A French Ebay purchase, with some rust. Great knife. It's super-flexible, and I can get more fillet off of the bones of a fish than I can with anything else I've got.
- Another EBay purchase of unknown origins. It needed a lot of cleanup. But the thing is super-sharp, and I find it really useful for finding those places where the ligaments fall away, and the bones separate
- A Japanese "boning" knife, or so the site said. Seems like a great knife, but darned if I can find a use for it.
Like anyone else, I need to slice ham:
or cheese and bread:
But sometimes things get a little weird, and I find a need for a "bird" knife (to remove the bones from a chicken or duck the hard way, from the inside), or a total hacking knife, to do random tasks I don't want to waste my other knives on:
Then, finally, there is the art piece, a David Boye which I bought many years ago, not as art, but to use. Turns out I can't think of a darned thing I want to do with a chef's knife, that doesn't seem more sensible to do with a cleaver, or one of my others. The thing is beautiful, and different (that greasy texture of the dendritic steel is unique), and holds an edge like you wouldn't believe, but it's not for me, and I'm not really a collector type so I will probably sell it at some point. Have you seen what these things are selling for these days?
That's the collection. Hope you enjoyed.
