The Best Serrated Knife for Slicing Bread and Tomatoes, Tested and Reviewed

Even though it seems to have a singular use, we think a high-quality bread knife is an absolute must in any knife collection. There is simply nothing better for the job of slicing fresh bread; a good knife is the difference between effortless slices that keep the integrity of the crust and the soft interior intact versus ripped, squished, wonky slabs that look like they might have been attacked by a weed whacker.

And while its primary use is bread, other foods benefit from a long, sturdy blade and a sharp, serrated edge that can latch its teeth into delicate and tough surfaces alike. Ripe summer tomatoes, for example, or watermelon or pineapple. Unless you’re an avid bread baker, you may not use your serrated knife every day, but on the days you do use it, you’ll sure be glad to have it on hand.

We set out to find the best bread knife for home cooks—one that cuts through bread, tomatoes, and other delicate, squishy foods with ease; has razor-sharp teeth and plenty of heft; and feels comfortable in hand. Keep reading for our top picks as well as the specifics of how we tested and what to look for in a serrated knife.

If you regularly slice big, crusty boules, we don’t think there’s a better investment than the Mac Professional bread knife. This knife replaced our previous winner during the course of our most recent rounds of testing. It’s made by the same producer as our long-running favorite chef’s knife and favorite paring knife, and it has similarly well-designed features that help it stand out in a crowded category.

The 10.5” length of the blade is about half an inch longer than any of the other bread knives we tested, and because of that, the blade can simply slice more in a single stroke with less effort. That’s especially helpful when you’re slicing wider loaves. In addition, the full-tang blade is thinner than many knives we tried, with a delicately sharp, scalloped edge that frictionlessly saws into whatever it is you’re cutting while requiring minimal force. While most of the knives we tested—especially the heavier ones—had a habit of cutting at an angle, this blade’s thin width helps it gently cleave through soft foods in a straight line. And while the thinness helps keep it light—about 30% lighter than the Misen, a previous winner—it does not compromise the Mac’s sturdiness. This knife feels solid and stable in hand, and moves steadily as it works.

The final, deal-sealing detail is its gently curved blade. Most of the serrated knives we tested have completely straight edges, but the gentle curve on the Mac makes a significant difference when you need to make a more specific cut, such as forcing through a tough patch of crust on the bottom of a sourdough loaf, or angling into foods you want to slice more thinly, like delicate tomatoes. Using the Mac Professional Series, it was a pleasure to slice a large sourdough boule into sandwich bread—and just as easily make perfect rounds of translucently thin tomato slices.

At $175, this bread knife is an investment, especially since it will require professional sharpening. And some might find the longer blade unwieldy to store, or unnecessary for smaller bakes, like those you’d pull from a loaf pan.

Specs

Knife length: 15.4”
Blade length: 10.5”
Weight: 6.6 ounces

As soon as we tried it, we fell in love with Wusthof’s double-serrated bread knife, making it one of our inaugural Kitchen MVPs. Comparing a double-serrated knife to a regular serrated knife is sort of like comparing a marine biologist’s image of a shark’s jaw to a child’s drawing of one: It has twice as many serrations, and having more of them on the blade allows you to exert less pressure when slicing. They also reduce the wear and tear on any individual serration, meaning the knife can stay sharper for a longer period of time.

Once it began cutting, the stability of the Wusthof’s blade really showed when we were slicing sourdough; The Wusthof easily made even bread slices barely a quarter-inch thick—thinner than any other knife. While we admit that isn’t a particularly practical use (bread cut that thin has pretty limited applications), it shows just how effective the knife’s design is. Unsurprisingly, it produces perfect, paper-thin slices of tomato too.

This is another expensive knife, which might be a turn off (we’d point you to our excellent budget pick if it is). It also has a 9-inch blade, which is an inch and a half shorter than our top pick, and about an inch shorter than other bread knives that performed well in our testing. But the double-serration makes it a dream to use, and might be a more important feature to some cooks than a longer blade.

Specs

Knife length: 13.4”
Blade length: 9”
Weight: 6.4 ounces

It won’t win any style points, but this excellent bread knife will set you back less than $20. Dexter Russell’s experience in quality cutlery goes back two centuries. The company’s knives, like this inexpensive cleaver favored by cookbook author and Epicurious contributor Hsiao-Ching Chou, show up in professional kitchens all over the place. And this slicer outperformed knives that cost almost 10 times as much. Its 10-inch blade managed almost a dozen mandoline-thin slices of tomato without slipping once and made easy, quick work of two loaves of bread, both thinly and thickly sliced. We used our testing ingredients to make a panini for lunch, which the Dexter Russell cut in half with almost surgical precision, making a perfect clean cut that beautifully revealed all of the fillings.

It doesn’t have a full tang, which means the blade doesn’t run all the way through the handle (go ahead and @ us if you know of any $16 kitchen knife that has this). So it just doesn’t feel as sturdy or substantial in hand as pricier knives we liked.

Specs

Knife length: 15”
Blade length: 10”
Weight: 4.8 ounces

Because it can’t perform tasks like chopping or dicing, a serrated knife is a niche tool. It’s never going to be as versatile as a chef’s knife or a paring knife. But when you need one, you need one. And they are more multipurpose than they get credit for. Obviously, a serrated blade is a must for slicing bread, both crusty and soft. But if you don’t have a carving knife, a good serrated knife can be used to make thin slices of roasts (as our winner, the Mac Professional, advertises), and as Brendan McDermott of the Institute of Culinary Education told us, they’re ideal on anything with a waxy exterior, like tomatoes, watermelon, and even pineapple. Your serrated knife will allow you to slice confidently without fear of the blade slipping and ruining your cut or your hand.

Yes, you can sharpen a serrated knife yourself, but you probably don’t want to. Unlike a chef’s knife or santoku knife, you can’t use a regular old knife sharpener or whetstone on a serrated knife. You need a special tool called a ceramic honing rod. This is not to be confused with the honing steel that may have come with your knife block. A honing rod is thinner and designed to go between the serrations on the knife to raise the teeth back to points. You’ll need to work in between every curve on the blade and, as with other manual knife sharpening, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you can cause some real damage to the knife. There are some services like Knife Aid that offer sharpening services for serrated knives, but if you have someone sharpening your knives for you, make sure to check if they do serrated knives, because not everyone will. To keep your serrated knives in top shape, consider them hand wash only. No quality kitchen knife should go in the dishwasher, since repeated dishwasher trips can damage the blades.

We were looking for a serrated knife that cut cleanly through a bread’s hard crust and a tomato’s tender exterior without mangling or tearing the delicate insides, and one that required minimal downward pressure to get there. The knives we found to be the most effective had narrower blades. The thinner the blade, the less surface area the knife has to destroy whatever it is you’re slicing. Points went to knives that cut crisply through the top crust of our loaf, didn’t tear the soft center, and broke through the bottom crust with minimal resistance. For tomatoes, the most effective knives—again with narrower blades—glided through the fruit in one fell swoop, leaving even, thin slices perfectly suited for a tomato and mayonnaise sandwich.

We recommend a knife that has enough heft to easily carve through tough crusts, layer cakes, tomatoes, and anything else with a firm exterior and delicate interior. However, the knife shouldn’t be so heavy that it becomes cumbersome and uncomfortable to use. It should be sturdy, durable, and balanced to increase control and productivity.

The shape of the teeth is an important factor: rounded, more scalloped teeth can have a reputation for being less effective than pointy teeth, but this is not always the case. In fact, pointy teeth have their drawbacks for bread cutting—if they’re too pointy, they can get caught on everything from the crust to the squishy centers and ultimately tear the bread. The combination of both pointy and scalloped teeth in the double serrated design actually proved very effective.

Blade design aside, a knife will not work well for you if it isn’t comfortable to hold. The knives we liked best had ergonomic handles that felt good using multiple grips, long-enough blades to pinch without losing a lot of slicing area, and sloped bolsters, which are the pieces of steel between the blade and handle that keep the knife balanced—and our hands from slipping.

We tested 16 serrated bread knives on crusty sourdough bread and winter vine tomatoes. We only tested knives with blades between 8 inches and 10½ inches. As we considered blade length, we wanted them to be long enough to easily slice through a wide boule, but not so long that they’d become unwieldy. As for shape, we only tested knives with blades that were in line with the handles. Some serrated knives are offset, meaning the handle is above the blade, but we avoided these to keep our test as streamlined as possible, and because former senior food editor Anna Stockwell told us they aren’t as safe as advertised.

Zwilling’s double serrated knife performed almost as well as the double-serrated Wusthof. It stalled a couple times in the midst of slicing lots and lots of bread, but it was still able to achieve impressively thin bread slices. It also achieved entirely intact slices of tomato. Its high-carbon steel blade and its handle are both slightly longer than the Wusthof, and the Zwilling’s handle is thicker too, so if you find thin handled knives uncomfortable to hold and use, you should be more than satisfied with this one.

Designed in partnership with Chef Nancy Silverton, the Made In Bread Knife is a heavier piece of cutlery—it weighs more than the Mac despite a blade that’s 1.5 inches shorter. It feels very sturdy, and has a sleek, appealingly modern look. For many, the 9-inch blade will be the goldilocks length: long enough to make a difference when dealing with large loaves, but not so long to be unwieldy. It’s a pleasure to use, but just didn’t perform quite as effectively as our top choices.

A good value knife, the Misen is a weighty, straight-edged bread knife with a 10-inch blade and easy-to-hold handle. It evenly sliced through tomatoes and boules, yielding precise, clean slices without crushing or mangling its subjects. It performed so well that it was our top pick in previous rounds of testing. The teeth aren’t too pointy, nor are they as wavy as some of the other knives we used. One thing Misen has mastered with its entire knife set (see our take on the chef’s knife and the paring knife) is producing total tanks that hold up well to heavy use. The Japanese steel is pleasingly substantial in hand at a very friendly price point.

“The handle feels small, which is perfect for me because I have exceptionally small hands,” noted associate commerce director Emily Johnson of the Shun Classic Bread Knife and its pakkawood handle. Other editors had more difficulty gripping it though, so this knife is really only recommended for those with smaller hands. It’s a wavy edge bread knife with a gentler slope between its teeth, but we found those wavy teeth to be sharp and effective at slicing through crusty bread and delicate produce alike.

The Opinel Intempora is an attractive knife that has a very slight curve in its blade. Its smooth polymer handle ranked high in our tests for most comfortable grip, and its pointed tip and gently curved blade allowed for just a bit more precision on delicate cuts. Its serrated blade wasn’t as smooth and effective as our top picks (its teeth didn’t grip food as well as our winners) but many cooks might like its shorter blade and affordable price tag.

We love the elegant look of the Lamson Bread Knife, and it feels sturdy and durable in hand. The 8-inch blade might be limiting, depending on whether your bread slicing needs include loaves with long diameters, and we didn’t find it to have much grip when making that first cut into a crusty loaf, so we needed to use more force than other knives required. But we love that the US-based company offers complimentary sharpening for life, which is a real deal when it comes to a serrated knife that might otherwise be a hassle to properly service.

Zwilling’s entry-level Gourmet series is an adequate performer, and if you were considering an affordable knife set like the Gourmet you probably wouldn’t be unhappy with this included bread knife. But slicing with this knife was more challenging than it was with the more upscale Zwilling Pro, the Mac Professional, or even our budget pick. If you are considering purchasing a serrated knife separately from a set and aren’t ready to go all out with the Wusthof or Zwilling Pro, we’d recommend the aforementioned budget choice from Dexter Russell over this one.

At under $70, the Messermeister Park Plaza Serrated Knife is relatively affordable, but only worth considering if you plan to limit your slicing to softer products. It couldn’t cut through the surface of the extra-crusty bread. Note: This knife is currently unavailable.

When using the Miyabi Kaizen 9.5-inch Bread Knife, we had to really put some weight into it and ended up with an oversized, crushed, nearly broken slice of bread. Our take: If it’s going to cut like that straight out of the box, it’s not going to last.

Picking up the Mercer Culinary Millennia 10-inch Bread Knife, we had high hopes; it felt comfortable and more solid in hand than you’d expect for a $15 knife. But the wider gaps between the teeth left it slipping all over the place on both bread and tomatoes.

The Tojiro Bread Slicer F-737 looks quite pretty, and it’s the only budget option we tried with a wooden handle. But it just ended up feeling a little flimsy to hold. It also labored on its bread slicing.

Another budget knife, the Victorinox Swiss Army 8-Inch, performed adequately on the bread, but couldn’t quite keep from crushing the thin slices of tomato. Also, though the Fibrox handle is advertised as nonslip, it’s so lightweight as to feel almost toy-like in your hand.

The Bob Kramer Essential Bread Knife by Zwilling struggled to get to the bottom when slicing boules. However, it cut through tomatoes like butter, slicing thinly and evenly. It was easy to control, contoured to our hands nicely, and had a nice heft. But at $300+ (depending on the retailer) you should get a bread knife that does not have issues with…bread. It is beautiful. Maybe if you cut a lot of tomatoes you could justify the price.

Why should you trust Epicurious?

We’re home cooks just like you—and we bring a home cook’s perspective to all of our rigorous testing. But unlike you, we have an extra 10 hours a day to spend geeking out over kitchen tools because it is literally our job. We don’t only use our recommended products in controlled settings, we bring the best ones into our own kitchens to help us put dinner on the table on a Wednesday night for our families, or to throw a dinner party for 12. When we recommend a product, you should trust that we’ve used it—a lot—just like you will. Read more about our testing process and philosophy here.