Watched this to make sure I'm treating my new knives properly and cutting with care. Found out that there is a high probability your clients needing repairs are straight savages that actually require prehistoric bone axes instead of japanese knives in their kitchens.
Your sacrifice of an obviously well-made Japanese knife in the service of education & prevention of foolish practices with such wonderful products will earn you some good Karma, Gage. Pork crackling is another thing to avoid (even though arguably it's something one could chew - except when too hard to eat...). I managed to chip my gyuto when cutting some pork upside down.... the meat was fine and, as I pressed down on crackling beneath, realised one millisecond too late that that was something I should refrain from. Woops. As it happened, I was visiting my knife shop next day to collect a new santoku, so my gyuto was repaired & restored to new in
"Let's do a video that shows poor knife habits that can damage your knife". Inadvertently makes a video that shows why you don't need to be terrified of damaging a Japanese knife, and if you follow a couple simple rules you will have no issues. Also hide your Japanese knives from anyone visiting your kitchen.
Believe it or not, this made me feel better about wanting to get one. The general impression I got before was that they're sharp AF, but will chip or crack if you look at them wrong, and you should feel bad if it happens because you're obviously terrible for letting it happen
A basic general rule of thumb for new folks is the harder the knife is heat treated the more prone it is to damage and the thinner the geometry is the more prone it is as well. Thin blades at 60+ rockwell are going to be a LOT easier to chip and crack because they break instead of bend. That is the tradeoff with high hardness for edge retention and the ability to have super thin sharp edges.
The real issue is the traditional steels they use these knives are brittle asf, meaning low toughness, vs. other steels they could use instead like say 52100 or aebl, or modern high end steels like say anything up to the even 10v. Even a basic low alloy "carbon" steel, good ol American steel. like 52100 is better than ANY of the traditional Japanese steels by a mile. Like every measurable and objective way it's better. But hey, tradition and stuff so lets use zero alloy white steels that were never intended for kitchen knives at all and have no edge retention and rust if you look at them wrong, or let's use extremely brittle stuff like AS... even AS at very high hardness like 65 rc in a denka doesn't have the "edge retention" you get from any old vg10 at 60 rc like in a shun. Technology. Isn't it great? but technology isn't hip and thus isn't hipster.
@@jeffhicks8428Best Japanese steel for edge stability are V-Toku2 and Aogami 2. They are so much better than AS. Western steel 52100 and AEB-L are amazing and would also suit them well. I don't think their choice in steel is optimal but I still think Japanese knives are great because of their excellent geometry and high hardness. They just cut so much better than European knives. Soft steel can have excellent cutting performance but it needs a low edge angle with a 15 degree microbevel instead of 15 degree edge.
You don't sell Japanese monosteel knives, but I have used MAC knives for 2 decades and given them as gift. MAC doesn't say exactly what their steel is but its something like AUS8 with hardened to 59-60 HRC. I know exactly what you mean by twisting a sharp thin bladed MAC santoku pressed on a cutting board, it grabs. Mine MACs get microchips that I grind out occasionally but they stay far sharper, far longer than my Henckels and Wusthofs. I have seen a nasty, 10mm by 3mm chip in a gifted MAC santoku. Though "stainless" I have a few pits from delayed washing after cutting salty foods.
Just bought a yu kurosake fujin santoku with turquise ferrule from ur shop should be here next Thursday i cant wait thanks for ur videos would have not known about ur shop. Bought all my other knives on chef knives to go and i love them but theyve been out of stock on the fujins for a long time keep up the good work
You're going to love it! Speaking of knives that are thinner and more delicate than these Tosaichi AO Supers, I wouldn't go trying any of these things with one of those ;)
Squash stalks is why Dao Vua knives were invented... Great video and I did the mirror image of your knife tip damage on a one day old Shiro Kamo San 210mm Gyuto sliding off my board and behind the stove onto ceramic tiles, only lost about three mm so I fixed it pretty easily on the edge of a 1k stone, but the cold sweat of dread you go into is a lesson learnt for life.
This is hilarious, I was going to get a Yu kurosaki knife and it's known for its super thin blade to spine, stumble upon this video as I go thru what not to do to keep your knife safe, still a little worried about damaging Yu kurosaki knife
I’ve got a Yu Kurosaki. The vg10 Fujin. Fantastic knife. So much more robust than my Masashi Kokuen. They each have their place. Love them both. What gets me is this video is less a ‘don’t do this to Japanese knives because they’re delicate’ and more of a ‘get *this* Japanese knife because it’s a beast compared to others.
I’m going to save this for people who mistreat their knives to see. Came here from the ko-bunka video. My heart breaks for the poor knife - it did nothing wrong… but one sacrificial lamb for the greater good I guess!
Don't forget scrub the cutting board with cutting edge :D The episode of the series hurts: D poor knife. DON'T DO THIS AT HOME. By the way , it's good knife to make a Bunka and givaway ;)
Hilarious just like some of my demo's they don't always go as planned! FYI You have got to see some of my students knives, dull, dirty and pitted, and then they ask me where I get my Japanese knives from.....
Good lord, im over here cringing at this abuse lol Good vid guys needed a little fun after a long day at work. BTW whats the HRC and steel on that knife ?
To do that on a chicken, you need a proper japanese knife, a honesuki. A hard knife can't be used to cut hard materials like bone, for that purpose you must use a softer knife or a japanese deba
Hey man, im really liking the new quality of the vids ,the intro still is a bit out of place, id go with something more classy and clean, but overall, i remember watching when the vids didnt have balanced audio and such and its a huge improvement
go get a CCK KF-1602 cleaver... I dare you to chip it. I gotta see the video if you do ! that cleaver is a beast. I don't know if you could reasonably chip the almost 2lbs of steel
My girlfriend eets squash a lot and ive banned her from my knifes. That shell is the worst thing i can think of cutting with my steel except for bone maybe.
What I want to know is would anyone do any of this with a western style knife? I feel like a lot of this would ruin something with thicker, softer steel too
I speak from experience to say that most people with western knives do this :') It certainly will cause damage, but usually to a lesser extent. That being said serious abuse will cause warping behind the edge which usually has to be ground out and with them already being thicker will require a boatload of thinning for the knife to be even close to useable.
Japanese knives need to be used differently than heavier western knives and use slice cuts not bang the board with the darn thing! Then they work and last fine. You do not have to sharpen them as much as western chef knives and they cut like razor blades with zero effort. That is why chefs love them. I use heavy meat cleaver for bone, thick meat, squash and bang stuff in the kitchen.
Well, this one might be a write off due to the crack, but this would be at around $100-120 after the chips/cracks ground out and then thinned! That is if the crack doesn't get any worse!
If you need some more damage done for a future video, me and my 2 years of shitty line cook technique will be more than happy to help! I'm sure I can break the knife really good for ya haha
Oh FFS just use a mandolin or vegetable fruit peeler for this stuff and cleaver for heavy work. Save the Japanese knives for slicing, chopping and dicing as they were designed for.
Your goal seemed to end up being just an advertisement for the Japanese knife you used. But thanks for showing me the worst scenarios for the use of the high-end steel Japanese knives that you’ve sent me. Slice, don’t twist or hammer. Don’t use them to cut anything you can’t chew. I’ve yet to chip any of my cherished Japanese knives. An ex-girlfriend used the blade of my Victorinox chef’s knife to hammer an oyster shell and damaged the edge. Need I repeat “ex”?
japanese knives are for the japanese. i was talking to a designer about one of his fixed blades and he said that it was designed for “urban edc” after a long conversation it turns out that he didn’t design it to cut at all and it was based on a mid evil armor piercing arrow head and the knife was more for piercing and prying which is his idea of “urban edc”. i was looking at a $1,100 kitchen knife that had a vg10 core and it was a chisel grind super awesome and i started looking at it and its warped really bad so i said something and they were like “it’s normal for laminated steel to warp a lot you just have to have them straightened” and they were telling me about the care and the outside steel rust but not the vg10 core… so i got to thinking about it and for the price they could have made the entire thing out of vg10 and it wouldn’t rust or warp at all ever and it would be much easier to make and cheaper. and you will see these slicey knives in japan and then weird midevil pocket knives that don’t cut and kitchen knives that rust and are bent. the traditional pocket knife there is like this front flipper with a really narrow thick blade like 3mm or thicker with a low grind on a blade less than a half inch wide so it’s really thick behind the edge but then the handle is just really cheap folded tin and the only way to get detente is to bend the cheap tin handles. their swords have a tendency to be ridiculously thick as well. also they make elaborate convex grinds that are squared off…. hard to describe but what is interesting is that they are not into explaining WHY.
This fits with the original video you did on this wherein you were surprised with how robust the knife actually was. I don't know why you don't lean into that and pacify concerns about "fragile" Japanese knives? Yeah, sure, low alloy, thick ground, knives that are common to the mainstream market will be more robust but I strongly believe the fragility of Japanese (or such styled) knives is vastly over dramatized. This includes rusting. It's absolutely important to point these potential vulnerabilities out but I don't understand why more vendors don't also emphasize how robust and capable many of the brands are. Again, educating about the possibilities and good practices is excellent but the bulk of knives out there can take a lot. Why not highlight that and assuage fears? I say spend more time on educating about how the core steel, cladding, and grind matter. Those are the factors the dictate how I buy and use my knives. When my torso turns and my hand lifts toward my knife strip, it's what's on the board that determines what my fingers wrap around.
We agree whole heartedly that Japanese knives are not AS fragile as people are afraid they are, and thats why we posted this video! With that being said, its still our job to educate people on proper knife use because regardless of the damage caused (or sometimes lack there of) we stand strongly behind the point that we got lucky, and its the one mistake that causes catastrophic damage to the knife. As for why we don't push this angle too hard, is because this IS still improper use. While some of these tasks didn't cause horrible damage or deep chips, they still caused damage to the knife. They caused the edge to micro chip and roll and bend and become dull almost immediately. This leads not only to a more difficult time sharpening the knife, but more material being removed shortening the life of the knife drastically and requiring the knife to be thinned prematurely. We find that this is actually MORE of an issue for users with thicker, softer, more robust European style knives as they are more likely to be less knowledgeable and take their knives to someone using a pullthrough or belt sander that will cook the heat treat to grind these chips out, and leave the knife awfully thick as well.
@@SharpKnifeShop Don't get me wrong, I loved the video and am very glad you guys show that stuff and am 100% behind educating on proper use! I'm just always surprised how resilient these knives actually are compared to what many of us may think when going in. I put off taking the plunge into J-knives for sometime because I'd heard so much about their fragility I was afraid I may either mess one up or have to be so careful with it I wouldn't enjoy it. I just want new folks to know you can use these knives and they are amazing! Respect your tools, do what Gage and the folks say and happy cutting!
