I want to thank Kipp for all his awesome contributions, including this thread. Food sticking to the knife drives me nuts so I'm on a quest to make my own knife with good food release.
But as Kipp has pointed out, the key is not just to maximize food release, but to find the right balance of food release and slicing ability (avoiding wedging). In other words: if you must keep the blade reasonably thin behind the edge, what is the best shape for food release?
I have a theory that it
must involve multiple ripples of some shape or another. If you aren't allowed to create one big hook to drastically separate the food, then you must do whatever possible to minimize sticking on the rest of the knife area. If the food sneaks past the first line of defense, then it hits the next attacker.
I have a botched knife that I was practicing grinding on and I decided to try something with the small wheel attachment. (Ignore how unfinished it is - this is a throw-away experiment that I did... and I'm brand new at this). I have to say, it does pretty damn well in terms of food release. It's weakness is when you julienne, the long thin strips can get stuck in the fullers. I probably could have gone deeper on the lowest fuller, and the top fuller is a little too high so it leave a small flat area where really sticky food like apples are able to sometimes hold on. But overall I'm impressed.
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