The Best Paring Knife for Careful Cuts and Precise Peeling

For detailed and delicate knife work—hulling strawberries, coring and peeling apples, or deveining shrimp—the best paring knife is the kitchen tool you’re looking for. The small-but-versatile blade is one of only four knives we think you really need.

There are two directions you can go with a paring knife. You can go the cheap route (and there are several very inexpensive paring knives we really like) and replace your paring knife every couple years, or spend more on a nicer knife that you can actually sharpen (one of the things that makes inexpensive knives inexpensive is that they aren’t likely to be durable enough to sharpen over the course of years). With this in mind, we tested 22 knives to find the best one. Read on for our favorite paring knives, and for more details about our testing process, scroll to the bottom of the page.

For a high-quality, durable knife that’ll last a while, we recommend this one from Mac, the same brand responsible for our favorite chef’s knife. The carbon steel Japanese knife has a little more weight behind its three-inch blade than other paring knives we tested. Still, its shorter length makes it feel sturdy, but not cumbersome to use. It slides through strawberries, cheese, and apple peels with smooth strokes and is ultrasharp. Though the price tag is steeper on the Mac than many other knives we liked, you can actually sharpen it with a whetstone or knife sharpener—something cheaper paring knives don’t always allow for—making it the kind of kitchen knife you can keep in your arsenal for years.

Like we said, this is expensive for a paring knife. If price tag isn’t a consideration for you, then you can’t get much better than the Mac. If it is, then one of the other mid-range-priced knives we tested might suit you better.

If you’re reluctant to spring for a pricier paring knife and just want a reliable knife, the Zyliss is a true budget option that performs well. While you’ll likely have to replace it after a couple years as it dulls (it won’t handle sharpening well), the Zyliss feels intuitive to maneuver when hulling strawberries and peeling apples. The ergonomic handle is rubber, which makes it extremely comfortable to grip and use as you’re dicing or mincing. It also comes with a knife sheath, which is especially useful if you’re someone who only keeps a few knives and doesn’t need a knife block or magnet.

In terms of style, the Zyliss is definitely lacking. Sure, you can’t miss that bright green color when you’re rooting around your kitchen drawer, but it doesn’t exactly look cute on a cheese board. Even the rubber on the handle, a feature we found very useful, won’t help the Zyliss win any beauty contests.

First we held each of the 22 paring knives in our hands to assess the comfort of the handle and the weight and feel of the knife. Then, to see how the knives dealt with both delicate cutting and high-resistance slicing, we used them to hull strawberries, peel apples, and cut through hard cheese.

To handle precise tasks, like peeling fruits and vegetables, paring knives must have very sharp blades. They also need a sharp pointed tip for hulling strawberries and deveining shrimp, two surgical tasks that require the tip to dig under and into ingredients with precision.

Lightness is a virtue in a paring knife. They don’t need any heft because it’s all about making small, precise cuts and carving lightly and smoothly. A sharp blade in combination with a very light handle makes for easy maneuverability. But balance is just as important. To test the handle-to-blade weight ratio, we pinched the base of each blade with two fingers to feel how much weight was coming from the handle. According to test kitchen director Chris Morocco, “Any excess weight in the handle just makes it feel like it’s going to fall out of your hand. You want something light that allows you to sit there all day and peel, without feeling it.”

Comfort and ease of grip are two things that’ll improve the knife’s accuracy in peeling small, knobby foods like ginger. You should be able to comfortably choke up on the knife when coring or carving fruit because being close to the blade helps with control.

Even though there are high-quality paring knives that don’t cost much money, there are plenty of cheap ones out there that are flimsy or have blades prone to detaching from the handle. Needless to say, you don’t want those.

In our original testing, we crowned the Kuhn Rikon paring knife as our most versatile paring knife. The Swiss-made stainless steel blade is inexpensive and easy-to-use, and in one of our rounds, it still held up pretty well. Ultimately, we favored the Zyliss as the best quality budget pick, considering it performed just as well as the Kuhn Rikon, but at a much lower price point. Plus, while the Rikon’s sleek all-black design made it look nice aesthetically, the plastic handle didn’t have the same nice grip the Zyliss has.

We ranked the Wüsthof Gourmet Paring Knife as the best knife for delicate tasks in our initial testing, recommending its lightweight and narrow blade for small, precise cuts, like hulling strawberries or scoring fish. It has a super pointy tip, which, in combination with its easy-to-maneuver size, makes it feel like a sharp extension of your arm. It also had a higher finish quality than the Kuhn Rikon. But the two knives we recommend are better all-arounders, excelling at a wider range of paring knife tasks.

The Global Classic paring knife would look impressive on a cheeseboard and felt light in hand, but it didn’t perform as well as similarly pricey knives.

Similar to the Global, the Tojiro was a style over substance situation–a handsome knife that didn’t quite justify its price.

When this beautiful knife arrived we had an inkling it might be all looks. It just seemed too instagrammable. We ate our words after we started using it a bit. Like the J.A. Henckels Classic Precision (see below), it performed similarly to the Mac for around the same price point. If you’re looking for a slightly more aesthetically pleasing paring knife for your kitchen, Made In might be for you. (It also comes in black and olive wood if red isn’t your style.)

The Mercer Genesis paring knife had one of the weightiest handles of the bunch. Encased in a rubbery material, it feels especially firm to grip. It’s a reliable mid-range price knife, and there are certainly worse paring knives you could buy.

In our most recent test we included some bird’s beak paring knives. A bird’s beak knife distinguishes itself from your regular old paring knife with its blade length—a small, super sharp hook that curves into a spear point, much like a, that’s right, bird’s beak. Handles on these can be a little longer and fairly light. Just looking at one inspires visions of precision.

However we would only recommend these for more advanced home cooks. The different design takes a bit of getting used to, especially when doing simple kitchen tasks like slicing cheese. When a bird’s beak really shines is during apple peeling. The characteristic curved sharp edge of the Victorinox Cutlery 2-1/2-Inch bird's beak paring knife easily found purchase and shaved off swaths of apple skin with ease. With a light, polypropylene, it’s a great budget pick if you want this style of knife.

The other bird’s beak we tested was the Mac Knife Chef Series, which performed much the same as the Victorinox—a bit tricky with simple tasks, but peeled apples with ease. The main difference between the Mac Chef Series and the Vitorinox are the handles. Where the Victorinox’s is a polypropylene, the Mac has a more weighty pakkawood handle (and a price tag that’s three times higher). Other than that, the two performed fairly equally.

The Farberware 3.5-inch paring knife looked, felt, and performed fairly similar to the Zyliss, right down to the nifty knife sheath. It did lose a bit of control when peeling an apple and it is missing those nice rubber grips we liked so much on the Zyliss.

The Zwilling J.A. Henckels Classic Precision paring knife ran neck and neck with the Mac—both hulled strawberries, peeled apples, and cut cheese well, and both knives felt firm yet swift. In the end the Mac beat the Henckels knife by just a hair as the top pick. This is still a worthwhile purchase if you prefer a handle that’s just a bit thinner and a blade that’s a little bit longer than the Mac’s.

The J.A. Henckels Dynamic 4-inch paring knife was another budget pick we tested. While its wide blade performed each task well enough, the handle felt just a bit too cumbersome to hold, enough to make the occasional hulling and peeling feel slightly unwieldy.

The Victorinox paring knife is highly rated elsewhere. We liked this knife, but preferred the Kuhn Rikon’s slightly wider blade and certainly the Zyliss’s more comfortable handle. Also, we found the Victorinox’s light weight verged on flimsy.

The Dalstrong Shogun paring knife is comfortable to hold, and the full tang connection between the blade and handle is seamless and high-quality—it felt like a true extension of our hand. We’d recommend the Dalstrong as a high-finish knife to anyone, but it lost to Mac because it was expensive for the same sort of performance.

We liked the Opinel Parallele paring knife for its narrow blade and attractive handle. It was good for hulling strawberries and deveining shrimp. We just preferred the finish on the similarly narrow Wüsthof knife—we also found it stayed sharp longer and felt nicer in the hand.

The Bulat paring knife ($65) was too heavy and bulky to maneuver and had difficulty with delicate tasks like peeling.

The Misen paring knife (currently sold out) was a little too heavy and cumbersome for our needs, which is consistent across the brand’s offerings; we like the Misen chef’s knife as an option for cooks who prefer a heavier German-style knife.

The Shun Japanese paring knife felt too long for everyday needs and was quite expensive.

The Wüsthof Classic paring knife, a higher-finish version of the Gourmet line, worked quite well and was very sharp out of the box. We didn’t find it as comfortable to use as the Mac knife, but it would make a good upscale paring knife to have in your collection.

The Five Two paring knife, from the in-house Food52 brand, is a super cute, small knife available in a variety of colors. It would look good on a cheeseboard, but we found it too heavy and cumbersome for more detailed slicing tasks.

The high-carbon steel Material paring knife is sleek, good-looking, and also available in a few color options, making it a good knife to put out for company. It’s extremely light and easy to use, we just wished it was slightly sharper out of the box.

Don’t get scared off by the price tag—the Mac paring knife is entirely worth it. The high-quality appearance accurately foreshadows its performance. It’s a razor-sharp, smooth, and efficient tool to add to your knife set. Its small size makes precise cuts downright easy. This is a paring knife that won’t let you down.

If you cook a little less, want to save some money, or just don’t want to deal with sharpening something as small as a paring knife, then the Zyliss is for you (now and then again in a few years). Its bright green ergonomic handle isn’t exactly aesthetically pleasing the way the Mac’s is, and it won’t last as long—but it feels good to grip and the blade is nice and sharp out of the box.

Want more knife recommendations? Check out our guides to the best chef’s knives, best bread knives, and best santoku knives.