Sam's Cookalong Diary Getting to grips with knives

Date Published:

10/01/2008

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Buying knives for the Cookalong with Gordon is trickier than it sounds

A tenner a head's not bad

A decent steak is not cheap, however. My local organic butcher in Oxford quoted me £39 for a kilo of sirloin (enough for four people). On the surface, this seems a rather daunting amount of money and, of course, you can get steak for less. But spending a few pounds more is better for the environment, better for the cow and better for you. It will also taste a damn site nicer. And remember that even at the most expensive end of the spectrum, at £10 a head it’s still cheaper than most meals available in restaurants nowadays.

Knives, meanwhile, are thoroughly confusing. Especially if, like me, you don't really know what you’re looking for. Prices range from £5 for a knife almost to infinity, and the array in the first department store I visited was baffling. I did, however, manage to pick up a few tips.

Tooling up

Crucially, it seems, the first thing to look for is whether the knife is made of one solid piece of steel. If the metal of the blade carries on all the way to the back of the handle, it’s generally a good sign of quality and it means that the knife will withstand a lot more pressure both when you use it and in the dishwasher. After that, things become more complex. What you choose will really depend on your budget and how often you intend to use the thing.

Because it’s still sale time, there are a few bargains knocking around. I managed to pick up an entire block with a sharpening steel for £9.99 (reduced from £26) and am pretty confident that they should serve most of my purposes.

The £750 knives

However, I did think that I should probably also spend a bit more on my main knife (not least because Channel4 are paying for it). I was sorely tempted by the selection of “Global” knives on display (a block of which had been reduced from a wallet-blowing £750 to £250, with an accompanying sharpening steel costing another cool £100). The shop manager, however, was most helpful. (Even if he remained unconvinced that I wasn’t a student doing some kind of shopping project.) He assured me that these knives, with their surgically honed Japanese blades and sports-car smooth lines, were really just for people who cook all the time, or for people who want to show off their knife collection as a status symbol. Neither of which describes me.

My informed choice

In the end then, I opted for a Sabatier knife for £26.50 (reduced from £46), which seemed to me to have a decent heft, claims to be 'the traditional choice of chefs' and comes with a lifetime guarantee, alongside a fantastically confusing back story about the origins of the brand name which can be read here.

Now of course, I’ve just got to work out how to use the thing properly. Join me tomorrow, when provided I’ve still got all my fingers, I'll be writing about how well I've managed to apply Gordon Ramsay’s sharpening techniques.

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