If you take great pleasure in cooking, you must also take great pleasure in using the best kitchen tools there are. However, the issue does not go down to merely choosing the best kitchen tools as it goes down to choosing the most appropriate kitchen tools. In other words, the best cooking tools are the most appropriate. To what should they be appropriate? Logically, they should be fitting the type of activity that you are going to perform with them. Let us take the example of kitchen knives.
Cooking knives rank amongst the most adaptable kitchen tools that anyone has. You can use them for an incredible number of activities when cooking. You can use your cooking knives, for instance, for cutting off, shaving, carving, paring, shaping, chopping, coring, peeling, slicing, slashing, sawing, hacking, and so on. The amount of things that you could do with a cooking knife is, in other words, remarkable. But what can you do when it comes to choosing between plain and serrated blades for your kitchen knives?
In most cases, the plain edge is preferable to a serrated edge when the function for which it is used is made of force cuts. What are these force cuts? With such cuts, the core cut function takes place by forcing the blade all the way through what you want to cut. For instance, when you want to peel a pear, you are actually forcing the blade in the peel of the pear. In addition, plain edged cooking knives are preferable when it comes to outermost power over the blade, when it comes to precision, and, finally, when it comes to sharp cuts.
To what concerns kitchen knives with serrated edges, they are preferable to the plain alternative in the case of sliver cuts, particularly into rigid surfaces, where the unevenness of the blade seizes and incises the material without difficulty. Sliver cuts involve application in which you pull the knife-edge transversely what you want to cut. For instance, you want to slice some type of dessert. Visualize it: you actually pull the edge crosswise the cake as you slice through it.
In other words, the plain edge is many times preferable for activities that involve shaving, peeling some fruit or vegetable or skinning some lamb or other type of animal. This happens because these activities call for force cuts or for great command over the blade. For the applications where the material is hard and even seems unyielding, kitchen knives with serrations are preferable. They are also preferable when you are cutting whole loaves, if you have a special delight in buying uncut loaves of bread. This happens because these activities need a sawing motion for their completion – which goes hand in hand with the serrations on the edge.
Ka-Bar Full-Size (plain edge) vs. Short (plain edge)
