Best Chef's Knives
We put eight 8-inch chef’s knives through a battery of tricky tasks, both in the lab and at home. Here's how Henckels, Wüsthof, and other top brands measured up.
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Finding a stellar chef’s knife amid all the options available isn’t easy. A quick online search yields hundreds of choices, ranging from $10 to $1,000 or more. Can you get away with buying a cheap knife? Would it be enough to simply buy a knife set? And what do you really get when you splurge on a dedicated chef’s knife?
To answer those questions, CR developed an expansive testing protocol, looking at eight different 8-inch chef’s knives in our labs with panelists and with our in-house expert in ergonomics. I brought all eight knives home to my kitchen and used them for everything from mincing herbs to deboning chicken thighs.
“A chef’s knife can really do about 95 percent of your cutting in the kitchen,” says Branden Lewis, a chef who’s also an associate professor in culinary arts at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, R.I. That’s why it’s regarded as the cornerstone of cutlery in most Western kitchens, designed to tackle everything from finely mincing parsley to deboning a chicken.
