drrayeye
Senior Member
The Xinzuo Lan series is advertised as “powder steel”, but if you look at the pictures, they state it’s 14Cr14MoVNb steel. Not a powdered steel, just more marketing mumbo jumbo.
I don’t know about Xinzuo and Hezhen being the same company, but I’m not surprised. Easier to fake competition and sell more of the same knives under different names. I’ve sharpened a couple Hezhen chef knife sets and the same nakiri as in the video you posted and the grinds are just kind of flattish and thick behind the edge.
You can see at the 2:45 in the Chef Panko video he struggles to use the Hezhen nakiri to cut the end off a carrot, then just skips to another vegetable. These Chinese OEM knife companies mass produce and mass heat treat their knives with poor quality control and spend most of their money marketing/advertising. Dalstrong is probably the most well known example.
Shun Kaji and Miyabi birchwood are on the mass produced side of the spectrum and are not indicative of the performance of most of the Japanese knives discussed in this thread or on this forum. Have you compared to any individual Japanese smith/maker?
Tons of pros use carbon steel. There are no sanitary regulations against carbon steel knives, I don’t know where you’re getting that misinformation from.
Why would anyone be suspicious of CCK? They’ve been making a proven product for a long time. Cleavers with nice thin grinds that are easy to sharpen. Have you actually used them, or just “held and hefted” them?
It’s well documented that Chinese “VG-10” is not real VG-10. Also, you asked him if he’s had “face to face” contact with the products he’s referring to like CCK and he said he’s talked to them and you just dismiss it offhand? Lol.
Your whole post is argumentative and dismissive--and I'm not about to keep this going. I've already more than suggested some possibilities--I've bought some, reviewed them, and had a collaborator verify my impressions.
There is already some of what I've done in earlier posts on this thread--which is what inspired me to get this far. Chef Panko has already done a ton of objective reviews of Chinese Vegetable cleavers posted on Youtube, and there are more reports by others out there.