The Only 3 Kitchen Knives You Need

These are the only three knives you need in your kitchen.

[upbeat music]

I have no idea why there are knife blocks out there.

I don't even use many of the knives

that would come with a knife block.

I would just buy individual knives

and start your own, well, I have a collection,

you don't have to have a collection of knives,

but if you were, buy these three knives,

because they're gonna work for you

and you don't wanna work for them.

[upbeat music]

A chef's knife.

It can go from seven inches to upwards

of 10, even 11 inches.

This is the knife you probably wanna invest in the most.

I don't feel comfortable telling you

exactly how much money you should spend.

You can get a great chef's knife

for as little as, I wanna say, $50, $60?

To some that are hundreds, if not thousands.

I strongly suggest not ordering knives, always,

and seeing if you can actually go and hold the knife.

Get a feel for it, hold it.

If it feels good in the hand, it's probably

gonna feel good in your kitchen.

General, it's your all-purpose knife.

You're able to do all kind of tasks with it.

So I'm gonna be using this one knife

to break down the chicken into multiple parts.

So first, I always find it easy to just start with the bone

by using the very kind of tip of the knife.

Do you see? Just very quickly.

Obviously, it helps to have a sharp knife.

And just kind of bring it back.

It should be very kind of effortless,

because if you're using a sharp knife,

it's really doing a lot of the work for you.

Going in there and using the tip

to carve that wing out, too.

When I am slicing meat, I'll be using

more of the blade in the center,

and then I'm gonna use the tip of the knife

to separate the breast from the breastbone.

Okay, so even here, you can just see the utility

of this knife and how well it works

to just break down this roast chicken.

Okay, so I'm gonna make some garlic paste.

I'm using mostly the center of the blade

to crush the garlic cloves, so you can get the flesh out.

And then what I'll do here is just kind of give it

a rough chop, just to kind of get it going.

And I'm using kind of the lower end

of the blade, towards the heel.

I'm gonna add salt to help break it down.

And what I'll do is I'll just take usually two,

three fingers, so I could put pressure,

and I'm using more of the upper end of the knife,

towards the tip, and just crushing the garlic.

And you see when I'm running through any ingredient,

like parsley, garlic, I'm having my hand

on top of the spine.

I find it easier to do this kind of rocking motion

because of the size of the blade.

You can do this with a cleaver, too,

but because of the height of a cleaver,

I find it a little bit more difficult.

Using a chef's knife to break down herbs

is something that I do pretty much every single day,

whether it's a really coarse chop,

where I still kinda want a leafy texture,

or if I want a really fine chop,

where it almost resembles powder.

Again, this is where I'm using, you'll see,

not so much the upper or center, but the lower half

of the blade, almost towards the heel.

Because you have your fingers on the spine,

you can just go very, very fast with this movement,

compared to if you were slicing or dicing,

and kind of immediately, you have this fine powder.

So I'm just taking a standard-medium size onion.

It's the length, it's the type of blade.

If you tried doing this with a paring knife,

it just would be too small.

You shouldn't have to be sawing

or having to put a lot of effort.

That knife should be able to just go straight down.

You want smooth, even cuts.

See? All my onions are the same size.

When you want to be more exact,

you wanna use the very tip of the knife.

The very tip of the blade is just allowing

me to go make these kind of quick,

deep insertions into the onion.

We're using, again, the blade, and just going straight down.

And because the chef's knife has, typically,

a seven- to 11-inch length, it's able

to do a lot of the hard work, and you get

these beautiful, even pieces.

From breaking down a chicken to chopping parsley

to a fine powder, a chef's knife really

is the essential knife you need in your home kitchen.

[upbeat music]

So with a paring knife, smaller, obviously,

than a chef's knife or a bread knife.

I love it.

I don't think it gets enough love,

because it really is a knife for those kind of pesky tasks.

Coring tomatoes, hulling strawberries.

Peeling vegetables, but you don't have a vegetable peeler.

It is definitely something that I think is essential,

and something that I personally think

you should never spend too much money on.

I prefer the cheap ones like this.

This one has a plastic handle, and it always does the job.

I'm gonna start with ginger.

This is just a knob of ginger.

There's plenty of different ways and opinions,

even among BA, of like how you should peel ginger.

What I just do is I kind of trim the very end,

and then I just kind of peel it with a paring knife.

And because it's a small knife,

it's easier to handle than, let's say, a bigger knife,

and so it's able to kind of contour and move around easily.

And you get a clean, nice piece of ginger, like that.

Because I'm using something so small, like limes or lemons,

I don't need a big chef's knife here.

What I'll do when I wanna serve a dish with citrus wedges,

I start at a 45-degree angle.

I'll just go around that core and get these

kind of beautiful shapes while avoiding the seeds.

It's a smaller task and you don't need this big knife.

This is almost like a food stylist trick,

just trimming the ends here, and then just going

straight down, and just going all around that core.

And I wouldn't ever throw this away.

I would use this juice. I would use this juice.

But you're avoiding that white, pithy bit and all the seeds.

Again, this would be a lot harder to do

with a chef's knife, just because it's bigger,

and you can be more exact using a smaller paring knife.

[upbeat music]

Okay, so the very last knife that I'm gonna talk

about is a serrated knife, also known as a bread knife.

But I feel like that it doesn't give enough attention

to what it actually can be used for.

Yes, it's perfect for bread, but there's also other tasks

that it can be used for.

Bread knives are quite cheap, like around $25, $30 max.

It has a little bit more of a give than, let's say,

a chef's knife or a paring knife or a lot of other knives.

The whole knife is long and straight.

You are not using the tip.

You are not using the heel of the knife.

You're using the blade, and really just to kind of do

these kinds of downward motions of slicing something.

You'll see these kind of teeth, these edges.

That's what you want because

that's what's gonna do the work for you.

So I have this beautiful Pullman loaf.

It has a [thumps bread] very hard crust.

I'm just gonna trim the very end of this.

[knife rustles]

You'll see the remnants.

And do you see how I'm using really

the whole blade to go back and forth,

really like a saw, that's how you should look at it,

to get a perfect slice of bread.

If you use a chef's knife on this, especially a dull one,

it's not gonna get through the crust.

If it does, then you're likely to have to put

a lot of effort and pressure on the bread,

and it's going to mush the bread,

rather than have it airy and in one piece.

You really want the serrated knife, where you have

that kind of evenness of the blade

and the teeth to do the work for you.

You shouldn't have to be putting in so much effort

when cutting up a slice of bread.

So I have a pineapple here.

It's very, very tough. It's very, very dense.

It's underripe, so it's particularly hard to cut,

but it's fine, because we have a bread knife here.

I almost said chef's knife.

And so I'm just gonna use that

kind of sawing motion to trim the top.

The teeth from the serrated really allows you

to cut the top, which is a very tough area,

and the bottom end, the stem end.

And then I'm gonna go down the sides,

and you can see that the serrated knife

can just go through very easily.

And even with something that's slippery,

and where it's quite dense right now,

'cause it's underripe, you still can easily

just slice it into whatever kind of pieces you like.

[crunches pineapple]

That actually tastes great, for slightly underripe.

This is why a bread knife, it needs to get a new term.

It goes beyond just a bread knife.

It's obviously used for that, but so much more.

Anything that's quite tough and dense,

I would use a bread knife for it to break down.

Again, you can go and buy so many different knives,

and overspend, but really, it comes down to these three

that are useful, and they're the ones

that you're gonna be using every single day, consistently.

For everyday tasks, for little pesky tasks,

or for one of those harder tasks,

these are three that are go-to.

No need to spend a lot of money.

It's just finding the right one

that feels right in your hands.

[cymbal crashes]

[taps counter] Okay.

Andy, go.

Okay, so-

[Director] I'm just kidding.

I mean, did you have things to say?

Always!

I always have things to say. [crew members laugh]