Not so long ago, the market of cookery equipment has changed dramatically. If previously professional equipment, special appliances and equipment was available only for chefs and restaurant owners, today you can easily buy anything. But there is some absurdity in this: it's not a problem to buy, but it's wise to take advantage of this quite a different matter. For example, you and ours have bought a fashionable knife santoku recently, but do you know for sure why it is needed.
Japanese knife santoku
We all know that it is the Oriental people who often fall into the category of long-livers. More than once it was said that much lurks in the way of life and nutrition, or rather, the diet. So, kitchen tools also went their way to the present day, undergoing changes precisely in terms of products.
Since the basis of Japanese ration is vegetables with rice, and the Japanese knife santoku is related to the French cutting knife, the result was excellent. The knife can easily cope with cutting, crumbling and chopping products. Even the name itself in translation means "three good things." This is what you get: the ability to crush products in three ways.
The knife will cope with vegetables, meat and fish. And many people note an unusual feeling in their hands: for all its weight and cumbersomeness, the knife proves to be very convenient, the hand seems to understand how it is necessary to manipulate them.
Santoku or chef's knife?
To answer this question, you need to first understand what the knife for santoku is used for. Its distinctive feature is the unusual combination of a fairly wide blade and a very small handle. It should also be noted that the knife is also considered from the point of view of weight: the center of gravity is displaced towards the end of the point, which allows you to operate the knife much faster. The cook needs to apply much less effort to cut or chop the ingredients. The second crowning feature is one-sided sharpening. Although, recently there were models with a traditional two-sided sharpening.
As a result, we get, the main thing for which the knife santoku is used, is slicing or breaking the products in large quantities and quite quickly. For obvious reasons, the question itself appears, but is not it easier to take a regular chef's knife.
The main thing in applying the santoku knife is its versatility, in fact not every knife is able to cope immediately with three types of products. As for the difference between this knife and the cook, there are several. Firstly, it is much shorter (the chef's length is 330 mm in length) and its blade is only 188 mm. Also santoku is much wider, it has a characteristic steep rise of the cutting edge. As a result, we have more weight, which can be considered both a virtue and a disadvantage.
Assigning a knife to santoku
With what we need a knife for santoku, we figured out, but does he need an ordinary housewife? After all, this is the paradox of the modern market: we can buy any kitchen novelty, but as a result, it simply decorates our wardrobe.
Here we have opposite opinions. It all depends on your attitude towards such novelties in principle. On the one hand, the knife will cope both with the cutting of boiled chicken fillets with thin slices, and with a potato spoon. Quite often the knife helps to cut the greens really finely, and turn the fish fillets into mince - and even more so. Santok is also a master in this matter.
This is the main advantage of your acquisition: the knife is really universal, but even an ordinary housewife can master it without any cooking courses. Yes, and the dimensions are quite compact, which allows you to store the knife along with the rest in the kitchen box.