The number three item I was choosing between would be a set of Global kitchen knives. Now, when I say set I mean a total of three, lol, not a big block full of knives. There’s no way I could have afforded a ‘complete’ set of them, hell, the three knives I planned to get came in at a hefty $162.
As one could have figured out I bought the surround system instead, didn’t buy the fine china (but compromised by purchasing completer pieces for the Nova Blue dinnerware I already own), and didn’t buy the Global knives. I again compromised, shock, and bought a set of knives that met all of my qualifications… except for the ‘big name’ quotient, lol.
My qualifications for knives are pretty basic, the same kind that you should keep in mind when making that sort of purchase: 1. They need to be full-tanged, 2. They need to have visible rivets (if not the Global ones), 3. The handle would need to be either part of the knife (as with the Globals) or be made of plastic (the good kind for lack of any other way to describe it), because there was no way I was going to put up with wood, 4. The knives must NOT be serrated, with the exception of the bread knife of course, and 5. Unlike most knives out there I require any knife I purchase to be fully forged instead of stamped or laser cut out of sheet metal.
That last bit, making sure the knives were forged, and of course had a bolster and all the other good stuff that goes along with such a knife, pretty much excludes everything out there in the range of “affordable” by most person’s standards. I was pretty much set on the idea that any good chef’s knife would cost me nearly $100, regardless of if it was a Global, Kyocera (the ceramic ones), Wusthof, or Henckels.
I didn’t plan on making a compromise in this particular area, until I randomly decided to go into Kmart (of all places) after stopping to pick up a bottle of wine for Matthew and myself for ‘movie night’ or whatever, lol. I went in to look at wine glasses, I was just curious to see if the semi-cheap Martha Stewart ones were molded or blown.
I’ve been wanting a good set of knives for rather a long time, ever since I bought this $10 set of rainbow coloured Ikea ones… and for all practical purposes those $10 knives are pretty good, meant to be thrown away when they lose their sharpness… not that they’re all that sharp anyway. With that in mind I’m always looking at knives anytime I’m somewhere that sells them, even if it is Kmart. I glanced at the wall and saw this $10ish paring knife and did a slight doubletake. “Whoa, wait, is that a bolster?” “Omg, it is… and it says forged on the packaging!” Well, right then and there I knew I’d be buying it, if nothing else it would make a great ‘bar knife’ for slicing up limes and oranges, etc. I already have a bar knife, but it isn’t anything special, just something that came in a tool set given to me by David & Louise.
I then looked around and saw empty places where other knives, like an 8″ Chef, would normally be. Hmmm…. and I saw they had lots of boxed sets, but pretty much the usual crap you’d expect for $50 or so. Again, with a slight doubletake I glanced a photo of a bolstered knife on a boxed set. I nearly came in my pants when I realized it was a full set, 14 pieces including block, steak knives, and honing steel. Granted, this was a “MSE” boxed set, so it wouldn’t be anywhere in the range of $600 like a ‘real’ set of professional knives would be, but I didn’t expect the price… at ALL. I looked… $60 for the set. No fucking way! I was thinking double that. I grabbed hold of the box, inspected it, and decided it would now have a home in my kitchen. It could not have possibly been priced correctly, they only had two sets, so it was one of those “buy it immediately and run out of the store” moments.
Once I returned home I started doing a little research, the kind of research I always do before buying something (usually), so this time it was a bit in reverse. I couldn’t find this set of knives on either the Kmart or Martha’s website, which I thought odd, but I kept looking. I found a google cached page of Kmart’s website where they were selling a 7 piece set (half the number of pieces) of forged knives identical in appearance to mine… guess what the price was… $60. The steak knives alone would cost $45 if bought outside of the set. This was an absolute steal of a deal for steel, haha, so bad. I felt quite content with my purchase, even if they were no way on par with the tragicly more expensive knives I wanted, they had to be better than the cheapass Ikea set I’ve been using for almost two years.
On television they’re always testing sharpness by slicing tomatoes, makes sense since they’re all squishy inside with that tough skin. Well, errmm… these knives, it was pathetic. They were dull, and I mean, like trying to cut the tomato with a hammer kind of dull. I wasn’t disappointed though because I figured they probably wouldn’t have been sharpened to their potential from the factory…. I’m glad I figured that too, lol.
After rummaging around downstairs in the “room of junk” aka the laundry room, I finally made my way over to the gun cabinet. Gun cabinet you ask, well, yes, because in one of the locked drawers I knew there’d be a set of Arkansas stones, you know, to sharpen knives with. Add in another lengthy period of time I finally found the key, because of course you don’t want that sort of thing to be easily found, right? lol…
I spent a ridiculous amount of time slowing sharpening every knife. It took forever because I hadn’t sharpened a knife in at least ten, probably more like fifteen years, and I didn’t want to wreck these within hours of owning them. I cleaned them up, and started to masacre more tomatoes. Also keep in mind that I’ve had a bumper crop of tomatoes from the garden, more than could ever be eaten, but not enough to can them… lol. So, it wasn’t like I went and bought tomatoes to destroy for this playtime.
Sharpening them on the stones made all the difference in the world. We’re talking ‘hot knife through butter’ sort of slicing and chopping. Sweet! They have surpassed the Ikea knives without doubt. Now, the question was how long would they hold that edge? I haven’t any clue what the alloy composition of the knives is, so that’s something left as a “time will tell” of course. They weren’t “easy” to sharpen, but they weren’t “difficult” to sharpen either, so I think they’ll do alright.
Slicing up the tomatoes was just a playtime activity, as I mentioned, the next day they would get a real test. Oh, and btw, the woman did arrived about a half hour after I posted my little bit of worry below, lol, apparently she neglected to inform me that she’d not be home as usual because she was stopping by her sister’s house, d’oh. I made ‘gourmet’ meatloaf, even though that kind of sounds like an oxymoron, it really was the best tasting hunk of beef I’ve ever eaten. I was able to fully test out the knives by chopping up lots of fresh herbs (something the Ikea knives were awful with, it was more like tearing them than chopping), dicing up lots of garden-grown peppers and also onions. For the first time in my life I could actually CHOP, SLICE, and DICE, without it being this insane hassle that left me hating the entire idea of cooking.
I’m glad I have fingernails.
I’m planning to make a fairly elaborate dinner Friday evening, just because I want to, really. There was one part of the meal I wasn’t so sure about, given that I’ve never had this thing known as a “Jicama” before. Apparently it’s kind of like a slightly sweet potato. So, I go out and find this strange and brown blob of a veggie and decide I’d go ahead and make that part tonight, just to see if it was worth serving, as one should. Now, this thing is hefty, a good pound of whatever you want to call it. I’m thinking… “okay, I’m supposed to julliene that entire thing?!” It was pretty effortless with a nice and sharp chef’s knife, score for that compromise again.
When I was sharpening the knives I didn’t make them quite as sharp as I could have, mostly because I was getting sick of the whole process, but also because the sharper a knife is the more quickly it will dull, and, well… I wanted to see how good of a job I was doing before I devoted more time to it. I read stories of people with the Kyocera knives and lopping off fingers (or tips of fingers to be precise) quite accidently because they were just that sharp. Given my limited experience with a ‘good’ knife, well, I didn’t want that to happen to me, lol.
I’m dicing up this red onion, trying that little candle trick that Martha called a “good thing” to avoid the tears. Let me tell you, it’s total bullshit, lighting a candle to burn off those evil little chemical vapors doesn’t work, or, maybe it does to the slightest extent, but it was still unpleasant. I only had half an onion to chop so I didn’t do my usual running water thing and rinse the knife constantly, (It’s the onion reacting with the metal of the knife that causing the tears, in case you didn’t know).
So, I’m chopping away, trying to remember the technique of tucking the fingertips in so they aren’t chopped off, lol, but with that technique I fear lopping off my knuckles instead. Then it happens… I feel this sort of “ding” on the hand holding the knife, the sound of the onions being chopped was suddenly different too. I immediately stop all movement and look down at the other hand, to see the knife dangerously close to my index finger, it is that way because I’d just lopped off a rather huge chunk of my fingernail. Knives 2, finger 0. No pain, no blood, the knife was effortlessly able to cleave off that huge chunk of fingernail, it also cleaved off a decent sized portion of cuticle, lol. “Oh shit.”
Ssssh, but I just picked the finger bits out of the onion and continued on my merry way, lol.
If you’re in the market for a new set of knives and have a Kmart nearby, I’d say go for ‘em… but only if you’re capable of sharpening them. The steel is for honing, so it won’t actually make them sharper in that sense… You’ll need a set of stones, I honestly have no clue how much they cost, but the kind you buy in a kitchen store are pretty expensive… the sharpening is easy, you just need to be careful to keep the angle correct (I chose 20 degrees). They don’t say “Martha Stewart” anywhere on them, well, except on the shears, but they do say “MSE” which is slightly less embarassing, but still lacks of the dignity of one of the “big names” being imprinted onto them.
Oh, and Jicama is pretty good, it does taste kind of like a potato, but, errm… different. ;)
