693 Kitchen Knives & Accessories
Quality knives and cutlery sets are crucial to a kitchen designed for frequent cooking. If you enjoy playing chef, you’ll love a good paring knife to cut fruits, a carving knife to slice ham, or a mezzaluna to thinly chop herbs. Here’s a quick look at the basic knife set that every kitchen must have, alongside cutlery sets and other knife accessories to complete your kitchen kit. More
Knives for every cut, food and occasion
Get started with a basic knife set with four to six knives. These will typically be a paring knife, a chef’s knife, a vegetable chopper, and a carving knife. Some knife sets also come with a knife block for easy storage, and steak knives.
A more extensive kitchen knives set will include:
A cleaver for meat. Cleavers are especially great if you like to fashion your own meat cuts instead of relying on butchers or pre-packaged meats.
A mezzaluna for herbs; this includes a curved blade with two handles and a chopping bowl of the blade’s diameter.
A boning knife for removing bones from meats; this would be a stiff and thin long blade for tougher red meats, and a softer thin long blade for more malleable white meats such as fish and poultry.
A cheese knife, which would ideally come with its own cheese board. If you want to get really specific, you can buy a cheese knife set with different knives for every type of your favourite cheese - from the soft cheeses to more hard cheeses and parmesans.
A serrated knife, also known as a tomato knife. Its serrated edge helps slice through fruits and vegetables that have tough skins, but soft insides.
A vegetable chopper will make peeling and chopping vegetables easy. These knives can be short or long, depending on your preferences.
A bread knife is great for families who love their bread (especially when cooked fresh at home), but hate smashing it every time they need a slice.
Knife sharpening tools and other accessories such as a sharpener, block and cutting boards are pretty important too.
Forks, spoons, steak knives & chopsticks: Cutlery sets to match your meals
A good cutlery set will have at least six of each type of cutlery - forks, knives, spoons, dessert forks and spoons, and steak knives - along with serving spoons. If you like Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean or Japanese food, then getting a good set of chopsticks is an excellent idea. While you’ll need chopsticks of different lengths for each specific cuisine, a good basic set along with bowls and chopstick rests is a good place to start.
Cutting boards and serving trays
No knife set is complete without some cutting boards suited to different meats, vegetables, fruits and herbs. For instance, you can buy a cutting board with a groove around the edges to catch meat juices as you use a boning knife to fillet fish. You can also use large cutting boards for big vegetables, and smaller wooden cutting boards for herbs, nuts and seeds. If you use cleavers pretty often, stock up on heavy-duty cutting boards that can withstand the chopping of bone and cartilage.
Decide which kitchen knives are perfect for you by listing all the foods you cook the most. Next, look for these specific knives online to understand which brands and prices best suit you. Before you know it, you’ll be whipping up your very own MasterChef platter!