The Shakti Stones of Cooking

A while back, I mentioned Mundial knives. I used some while working in a commercial kitchen, and I thought they were great, so I bought a few.

I bought a Santoku with a hollow-ground blade (divots running down the side to make food fall off), a 14″ slicing knife with the same feature, and a cleaver. I was hoping the cleaver would be as good as the amazing $10 job I got from The Wok Shop, only stainless.

The cleaver turned out to be pretty heavy. You can’t cut vegetables with a thick knife, so the cleaver didn’t work for me. A thick knife will be hard to push through tough vegetables like potatoes and yuca, regardless of how sharp it is. You’ll have to push until the food gives, and then you may cut yourself when the knife finally busts loose. My Wok Shop cleaver is very thin, so it’s easy to cut film-like slices of just about anything. The Mundial cleaver seems to be very well made, but it’s not tough enough for meat, and it’s too thick for vegetables. I decided to follow up with a stainless Forschner cleaver, which is much better, but still a little thicker than I would like. The Wok Shop still rules. Best kitchen knife I’ver ever owned.

The santoku is also well made, but it just doesn’t work for me. Something about the shape of the blade. My regular knife is a Forschner chef’s knife, and it’s perfect. The curved edge works wonders when you rock the blade. It’s thin enough to cut vegetables well. The handle is great. It takes an edge in a few seconds. The santoku is too straight, and food doesn’t really fall off the sides of the blade. It doesn’t have enough weight to work for things like mincing. I may go back and order a chef’s knife. The Mundials I fell in love with were chef’s knives. It’s funny; many Americans are convinced that the Japanese are always right, but I’ve found European-style chef’s knives to be much more useful than santokus.

The slicer is great. Zero complaints. I probably should have bought a smaller one, though. They come in three sizes, and I went with 14″ because I have had problems with slicing knives being too short. I think the best answer is to have a long one and a short one.

I went on the web and said a few things about the Shun knives (made by Kershaw) that I had bought. I didn’t expect to make Shun-lovers angry, but that’s what happened. It’s funny how people will get angry when you criticize a product. You would think they had given birth to their knives.

I had a Shun santoku and a cleaver, plus a Tojiro nakiri. I found them useless. The Shun site states that Shun knives are dishwasher-safe, but chunks fell out of my knife when I washed it. The cleaver was short, way too thick, and poorly balanced, and after the santoku incident, I knew I could not put it in the dishwasher. The nakiri was just stupid. I cannot understand why they exist. Thick and fragile. I gave away all three knives. They were taking up space and doing nothing for me.

Shun-worshipers told me I was a “moron” for putting my knife in the dishwasher. I guess Doug Kershaw is a moron, too, because his website says the knives can take it.

I don’t get the Japanese-knife-adulation fad. The knives are extremely well made, and the quality is attractive, but they just don’t perform. What good is a tool that doesn’t work? You could make a chef’s knife with a gold blade if you wanted, and I’m sure it would be pretty, but what’s the point if you can’t cut anything with it?

The Kershaw site says that while Doug will not actually put a voodoo hex on you for using the dishwasher, it’s better to hand-wash. And they even give instructions for doing this:

The best and easiest method is simply to wash the knife using a damp sponge and mild soap right after you use it. Make sure you do not run the sponge-or your hand-directly along the blade at any time. Towel-dry the knife and let it air dry for a few minutes before retuning [sic] to its proper storage.

Good Lord. Is it a knife or a sick baby? Here’s what I do with my Forschners and Mundials: toss in dishwasher, turn on, flop in front of TV. They never chip. They are just as sharp as Shuns. They don’t cost much. You can even get them with color-coded indestructible NSF handles. The choice is obvious.

I’m thinking I should get a couple more chef’s knives, so I will be able to go back and forth between ingredients without spreading germs. Imagine buying enough Shuns to do that. Three knives…$400. I could have forty carbon-steel cleavers for that.

Picture yourself working with, say, four Shuns. When you’re done, you have to pick each one up, find the “mild soap,” wash it the way nurses washed Richard Pryor after he burned himself, set it aside to air dry (!), and then put it away in your special Japanese knife kimono or whatever. I don’t know about you, but I work hard in the kitchen. I’m not just slicing “boil-in bags.” When the night is over, I want OUT. I can clean four Forschners in four seconds. Dump in machine; turn on.

I will never buy a sissy container to protect my knives, unless I need something to carry them around. I use a magnetic bar on the wall, just like a real chef.

I still have to hand-wash the cheap cleaver, but it’s worth it, because that thing BURIES a Japanese cleaver. I can sharpen it in thirty seconds, to the point where I can hold a paper towel in my left hand, wave the cleaver through it with my right, and watch half of the towel drift to the floor. It crushes garlic. It tenderizes meat. It works as a shovel. It minces effortlessly. It’s so good, it’s weird and inexplicable.

People say I misunderstand. Japanese knives are great if you TAKE CARE of them. Excuse me…I thought they were supposed to work for ME.

It’s really this simple: they don’t work better than cheap knives, they cost much more, they are much harder to maintain, and they are extremely fragile. Where, in all that, is the reason for buying them?

I think I know what’s going on. Insecure people like buying stuff that validates their existence. The Shun people are probably just like the guys who spend $10,000 on CD players and claim it’s worth it. If you have Shakti stones under your clock radio, you will probably love Shun knives. A fool and his money…

I know Alton Brown recommends them. Of course, they PAY him to do that.

Tools are confusing. Sometimes the pricey ones pay off. Sometimes they’re money sinks for the weak-minded. I have been sucked in more than once.

Here’s an illustration of the choices people face. You want sharp knives, right? You can spend billions (small exaggeration) on a machine called a Tormek. Some people who own them will swear they’re essential. Other people will insist you buy expensive Japanese water stones, which you have to keep in containers of water, which, I’m sure, get funky after a few days in the garage. But it turns out there is a sharpening method which is better and cheaper, at least for some applications. It’s called the “Scary Sharp Method.” You buy a piece of flat glass and some sandpaper, and you go to town. Probably costs $20 for supplies that will last five years. Personally, I use a coarse diamond hone and a fine ceramic hone, and the results are spectacular. But you can see how confusing it can be.

A knife’s edge is something that only lasts a short time, anyway, and no one can tell how you sharpened it when they look at the food. You shouldn’t spend an hour trying to get an edge that will be gone after three heavy cooking sessions. Manufacturers know this. Non-Japanese cutlery makers know how to make knives just as hard as the Japanese ones, but they also know that hard knives are brittle and hard to sharpen, so they deliberately limit the hardness. If you think it costs a lot of money to make a hard knife, go to the hardware store and check the prices on files, which are extremely hard.

You can spend a million dollars equipping a kitchen. But you have to ask yourself: what kind of stuff do they use in restaurants? Mundial and Forschner. Aluminum pans. I use Update International cookware and old cast iron from Ebay, and my food is so good it shocks me. Sometimes quality matters, and sometimes it doesn’t. Money ALWAYS matters.

The more in love people are with their tools, the less capable they are of producing results. That’s a rule of thumb arising from my own observations. A lot of people love appearance more than substance. I’ve known dozens of “writers,” but most never wrote much of anything. Most people who own Ferraris don’t know how to drive them. Do you love doing what you do, or do you love thinking of yourself as the type of person who does it? A real cook will do better with tools from KMart than a Food Network fanboi will do with All-Clad and Le Creuset. This is why we have the expression, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

It’s pointless to write this. Some people are incapable of looking past tool quality. If it’s made really well, it must be the right thing to buy!

Get yourself one of those Wok Shop cleavers. You don’t know what you’re missing.