Among all Tools and gadgets that can fill a kitchen, the knives are undoubtedly the most personal and the most essential. Admire one in the collection of a chef and prepare for an unsolicited ear in its history, but do not expect an offer to try it. My own collection is modest but I am proud of it. Among them, my favorites are a classic kitchen knife and my tadafusa santoku. The Wüsthof is compatiblely, exploring a shallot in the cut of a chicken and the more clear blade angle of the santoku cuts through vegetables like a scalpel.
A new knife of Misen chef promises the best of the two knives, making affirmations of giant killers on innovative geometry, high quality steel, a santoku style blade angle and free clarity for life. More impressive, he boasts of what he calls the “honest price” of $ 65, a number less than half the price of high -end knives which he calls for his competition.
Intrigued, I called one to test. Misen started as a kickstarter but ships his knives this fall. A few days later, I had my chef’s knife, my santoku and the chef Misen’s knife lined up with each other on my cutting board. The most striking feature of Missen was the lateral view, which looked a bit like the two knives, combining the flatter belly of the Santoku and both the handle and the scanning up to the tip of the chef’s knife, a sort of westernized version of a Japanese knife known as the Gyuto.
I bought a bag full of grocery store to chop and declared the current game. The differences between the three knives were immediately apparent. Although the Missen most like a knife of a traditional chief, it does not really behave like one. The Wüsthof has a large curved “belly”, a German style which encourages a rock cutting movement with the tip of the knife planted on the board, the rear moving from top to bottom, while the whole slides from front to each time. The Santoku style is more based on maintaining its flat blade parallel to the cutting board, sliding forward each movement down.
For me, the Misen often felt the most comfortable using a Santoku style stroke. It was particularly noticeable when I worked through something large like a corner of cabbage or cutting a bunch of herbs. Try a blow that allows the Wüsthof to go through this kind of work with the Mingen and it will look like a thud each time the length of the blade hits the cutting board. That said, I felt confident that the best blow for everything I cut with the Misen would become apparent with use, and I would improve with it over time.
Preparation work
In my confrontation with three elbows with a grocery bag, the Misen have never become my weapon of choice. The first thing I worked on was to cut bacon in quarter thumb for a potato and leeks soup. Cutting the thick slices into long bands was good, but when I went to the cross -cutting, things became … risky. The Wüsthof has crossed cleanly, creating beautiful corners and neat edges. The Misegen needed a awkwardly exaggerated blow to get the same result, otherwise he slightly crushed the cubes. He had similar difficulties with the end blows that cut a red pepper in the tiny cubes of a brunoise.
Like the Wüsthof, the Mingen used its weight to easily decide through a redhead potato and, just like the Wüsthof, the slices stuck on the side of the knife with a suction force, a common problem that my Santoku has bypassed thanks to a decline on the side of its blade. The three knives flambé through leeks and chives. The Wüsthof and the Mingen both made admirably cutting a chicken into pieces, including food through the maternal, something I would not do with my Santoku.
On the other hand, the Santoku is my unmissable knife for most vegetables, unless it is something really firm on which I have to look, but here I noted something special. Mingen praises his blade angle at 15 degrees of the Santoku type, as opposed to the wider angle of most chief’s knives, but just like my Wüsthof, the Mingen never felt like my Santoku Like room.
Slice check
Despite these reluctance, this attractive price was large and I called a pair of lidesmiths to decode what was going on.
“Most people will assess their advantage in the first 10 minutes of use,” said Daniel O’malley of Epicurean Edge in Kirkland, Washington, who explained that a diligent knife sting can put a fairly lively advantage on most knives, but the poles do not hold this side for a long time. “Really, what we should care about is what they think of 12 months.”
On the phone, I went to O’malley to the Misen website, where the company talks about what makes its knife special and the way it says that the knives are measured against their more expensive competition. He became silent for a while.
