"The best tools shouldn't only be accessible to the pros" but his knife costs more than every knife in that database.
The weight is listed in their help articles as 330g. I also think that handle is chunkier than a typical high end chef's knife. It may be easier to cut things with it, but I think your hand and arm are going to get tired of using it more quickly than with a regular knife at ~100g less.
And I realize these fare worse than the high end japanese and german knives, but it's hard to get excited about a $400 knife you can't put in the dishwasher when you can get a perfectly credible fibrox knife for about a tenth of that, which doesn't require charging and can tolerate 'careless home cook' levels of abuse.
You're supposed to keep a glass of water with a bit of chlorine bleach (to obtain roughly 300 ppm) handy for wiping your tools and surfaces down as you work. Not that anyone teaches Home Economics at school any longer.
This is what I learned in cooking school but also never actually saw in practice in restaurants I worked in (which were fine-ish dining in the Bay Area).
Taking a piece of metal or a plate that has any oily or other non-water-soluble food on it, rinsing it, and chlorinating it results in a mess that might indeed be non-infectious but is otherwise disgusting. Also, leaving a piece of stainless steel covered in chloride (which that bleach will turn into) is one of the worst things you could credibly do to it in a kitchen context. (And, while the relevant regulators don’t seem to care about disinfection byproducts in a kitchen, all those residual organics that didn’t get removed plus hypochlorous acid seem like they would thoroughly fail most drinking water standards.)
Also, I don’t know what all the food safety and dishwasher vendors are telling their customers, but that nice residual chlorine has a tasty and odor that is not appetizing at all. But you can also legally disinfect your dishes and such with sufficiently hot water, and you can buy a commercial dishwasher that does that instead of using chlorine.
In a home context, what’s wrong with dish soap and a sponge or brush? In a commercial kitchen that really wants to be compliant could use dish soap followed by a (very) hot rinse. The average household instant hot water tap is plenty hot for this, too, although demonstrably hitting those HACCP targets might be tricky.
I'm not disputing that, and it's kind of my point. Most home cooks (I would bet millions) are not worrying about "the cutting experience" when they are making dinner. They are using a knife to cut up vegetables or slice meat or whatever. Then they are putting that knife in the dishwasher. Not all of them, but most.
I think my other points matter more. I think people who are invested in the experience as you suggest care about more than just the edge and finish, they care about the weight and balance and feel as well. I think this knife is probably worse on those qualities.
I don't mean to say this knife sucks or that this guy is dumb. It's a cool knife, and he's clearly not dumb. I just think this is more a passion project curiosity kind of thing than a useful product addressing a large market need. Maybe a future mass market version (cheaper steel, stamped, more contoured handle) would change my mind.
> Most home cooks (I would bet millions) are not worrying about "the cutting experience"
Indeed, and they won't buy the knife at this price anyway. My point is that not being dishwasher-safe does not matter for ~everyone. If they care, they won't do it; if they don't, they won't buy it.
It's hard to do irreparable damage to the steel of a knife. It's just an inert lump of metal. But you could fuck up the handle. Theoretically, the detergent could dull your edge. If you don't isolate your knife and it rattles around, that'll definitely dull it. Mostly: it should only take a couple seconds to clean off your knife in the sink.
> It's hard to do irreparable damage to the steel of a knife.
It’s easy — just heat it above the tempering temperature of the steel in question. You can achieve this in an ordinary oven for most steels, and you can also achieve it (locally) with a motorized sharpener that isn’t cooled. Don’t take a knife you care about to be professionally sharpened by a person who uses a non-water-cooled power tool.
> It's hard to do irreparable damage to the steel of a knife.
Sadly not impossible, I've 'lost' (they're still in the back of a drawer) two good knives to idiots attempting to pry apart frozen chops and steaks .. each case snapped a good inch from the tip.
Not damage from a dishwasher and not damage the edge I realize, but worth mention as a tale of caution.
The steel used to make the knives is not always stainless, so it can stain or rust. Even stainless is really just stain resistant.
Dishwasher detergent is caustic and corrosive to steel, so over time it can pit the metal and dull the finish. Handles will swell and become loose or deteriorate, either because of wood repeatedly being waterlogged and dried or just from the heat cycling. A loose handle can be unsanitary, unsightly, dangerous, or all three.
You'll often read that knives in the dishwasher will bang around and that will damage the edge. And that it's more likely you will hurt yourself pulling a knife out of the dishwasher vs. cleaning them properly.
Phosphoric acid detergents will pit your blade. If the knife is not a stainless steel, the wash and dry cycle will cause accelerated rusting. In wooden-handled knives with a rat tail tang construction, you can start destroying the handle from the inside out due to gaps in the construction allowing water seepage and degradation. In non-stainless knives, that same construction becomes the point where rust tends to build up.
Then you also have the action of the dishwasher water jets bouncing the knife around, dulling and destroying the edge.
Only the shittiest cheapest plastic-handled knives I own touch the dishwasher. Everything else gets cleaned and wiped by hand and put straight to the knife block or its respective scabbard.
"The best tools shouldn't only be accessible to the pros" but his knife costs more than every knife in that database.
The weight is listed in their help articles as 330g. I also think that handle is chunkier than a typical high end chef's knife. It may be easier to cut things with it, but I think your hand and arm are going to get tired of using it more quickly than with a regular knife at ~100g less.
And I realize these fare worse than the high end japanese and german knives, but it's hard to get excited about a $400 knife you can't put in the dishwasher when you can get a perfectly credible fibrox knife for about a tenth of that, which doesn't require charging and can tolerate 'careless home cook' levels of abuse.