Baltimore Sun Article With Good Info on Kitchen Knives, including Cutco
This was printed in the Baltimore Sun last fall and gives very good information on kitchen knives many reps lack. Also a good site with more info on kitchen knives can be found here:
http://www.consumersearch.com/www/kitchen/kitchen_knives/fullstory.html
Teacher's a cutup in N.Y. school
By Stephen G. Henderson
Special To The Sun
Originally published November 26, 2003
Afew weekends ago, I committed fraud in my kitchen.
I blame it on a house guest, my dear friend Harold, a know-it-all who truly does know it all. Harold can just as easily recommend a chic hotel in Bombay - ("You know it's called Mumbai over there, don't you?") - as he can whip up a frittata from food I didn't know I had in my refrigerator.
Harold is sweetly generous with his wisdom - otherwise, I might start to hate him. Even so, it's always a bit intimidating when he visits.
Anyway, I returned from a quick errand that Saturday morning, whereupon Harold surprised me with the aforementioned frittata, and then, offered some undeserved praise. "You are to be congratulated," he said. "Your knives are all sharp! Do you know how many kitchens I end up cooking in where the knives are so dull, they couldn't cut gym class?" I mutely accepted his compliment, and therein lay my fraud. You see, I didn't tell Harold that my knives were sharp because I rarely use them.
Oh, I cook all right. I chop. I dice. I slice. Fact is, though, for nearly all such chores, I rely on a serrated behemoth that could probably saw through cinder block. Serrated knives never go dull, I'd discovered. Sure it made a hash of some things (like onions, flank steak or ... ), but I muddle through.
When I related this story to Cindy Wolf, chef/owner of Charleston and Petit Louis, she let out a commiserating laugh. "No one should be intimidated, especially by things they never had a chance to learn," she said. "I firmly believe there should be a chef instructor in 12th grade, and that cooking class should be mandatory for everyone! There are some skills you just can't learn from reading a recipe."
"I'd need to show you how to hold a knife," she continued. "Because the harder you work to use a knife, the easier it is to chop your finger off."
Lesson in knife skills
I smiled, thinking this might actually be an offer for a tutorial - just Wolf, me and a pile of carrots, fresh for the slaughter. But no such offer was forthcoming. I guess she's busy, what with running two of Baltimore's most popular restaurants.
So, I signed up for a lesson with Norman Weinstein, a nationally recognized knife skills instructor who's taught since 1995 at the Institute of Culinary Education (formerly known as Peter Kump's New York Cooking School). Weinstein, 65, a Brooklyn native who absolutely sounds like one, is a cheerfully frenetic man whose comic patter is as well-honed as the blades on his beloved Wusthof cutlery.
"First of all, there's one thing you need to know about me," he began his class by saying. Then he shot out both arms to the side, his fingers shaped into the double V pose of victory infamously assumed by Richard Nixon. Weinstein shook his head to simulate the former president's jowly face. "I'm not a cook!"
This tortured, not to mention dated, pun on Nixon's denial of wrongdoing during the Watergate scandal didn't get much response from the four men and eight women in attendance. Weinstein's claim also wasn't, I subsequently learned, exactly true. He is a crook ... uh, cook ... with nearly 30 years of experience in Asian cuisine. In fact, it was his having to master the delicate preparation of vegetables, seafood and meat for Japanese and Chinese recipes that propelled him into a second career in teaching knife skills.
What he meant by his joke was that he was not one of those cooks who expect you to already know everything. Weinstein assumes complete ignorance on the part of his students, but promises that after three hours their knife skills will be, well, sharpened.
"There's lots of confusion out there about which knives do what," he said. "People are given a set of knives for a wedding present, and God knows what happens to them. I want to take all the anxiety out of dealing with knives. This is really a stress-reduction class."
Trying to get some sense of what he was working with, though, Weinstein wondered aloud what sort of knives people had in their kitchens.
One woman said she had Calphalon.
Weinstein's face blanched. "We'll talk about that later," he replied, ominously.
Another hapless student had brought along some knives from home, and gamely held them up, as if this were show and tell. When Weinstein spotted a knife from Cutco, the brand sold door-to-door, he regarded it with disgust, as if it were a used diaper.
"You're trying to get me mad, aren't you?" he asked, with mock fury. "Why, why, would you buy such a knife? So, some kid's trying to work his way through college? Good for him. Bad for you."
He then tried to balance this knife's center like a seesaw on his extended fingertip, but it consistently fell off. This lead him to observe that good knives are engineered so that the weight of the blade is equal to that of the handle. He then swiftly deconstructed Cutco's main sales claim. "They tell you if the knife ever gets dull, you can return it to them for sharpening. What? You're supposed to go out to dinner every night until it's returned?"
Weinstein was now on a roll, and began his main lessons of the day. A collection of knives is a "wardrobe," and our kitchens are naked without at least an 8-inch or 10-inch (depending on one's hand size) chef's knife, a serrated bread knife, a paring knife and a honing steel.
"A serrated knife should only be used for something where the exterior is thicker than the interior, like a crusty baguette, a tomato or an eggplant," he said. As Weinstein spoke, my heart raced with guilt. Did he know my secret shame?
In rapid order, he taught us how to use each of these tools. From point to base of a knife, there are four areas: the tip, blade, heel (where the blade ends) and handle. We were to grip our chef's knife by resting the middle finger against the knife's heel, the thumb gently curved on the blade's nearest side, the index finger placed along the blade's far side.
"I don't want to see anyone resting their index finger along the blade's top," he commanded. "That is wrong, wrong, wrong!"
Forget chopping
Also wrong, he maintained, is the use of the word chop. We shouldn't think about chopping food, but slicing it. He thwacked his knife down through a carrot, and the blade cracked against the wooden cutting board. ("That's the last time I want to hear that sound.")
Instead, we practiced angling the blade forward, away from us, down through the carrot, then letting the knife glide flat on the cutting board for a moment. Repeating this process over and over should feel like one continuous motion, Weinstein said. He then offered the opportunity to squeeze his upper arm as he worked. When he incorrectly chopped the knife downward, his triceps tensed up. As he steadily rocked the knife forward, though, his muscles were at peace.
Slice is right
Soon enough, it was our turn. While we worked our way from tomatoes on to onions, Weinstein moved among us, patiently repositioning our fingers, offering encouragement and still more helpful tips. Never wash knives in the dishwasher, always by hand. Purchase only fully forged knives, meaning the blade is cut from a single sheet of steel. The best knives are made in Germany. (Cindy Wolf agrees on this point). "Henckels are OK," he said. "Wusthof are much, much better."
Luckily, Weinstein's ability as a pedagogue far exceeded his deficiency as a comedian. In an amazingly short time, nearly everyone was rocking his and her knives like pros, creating thin crescents of celery and julienne carrots.
Weinstein then demonstrated how easy it is to use a honing steel. He recommended placing it perpendicular to the cutting board, its end nestled in a dish towel. Then position the blade toward the steel at a 20-degree angle, a bit of geometry that he made simple by reminding us what 90 degrees and 45 degrees looked like, then halving this latter. ("There's no secret police who will show up if you are at 18 or 23 degrees," he cracked.)
Three sets of swipes, alternating on each side of the blade, and you are good to go. "But sharpen your knives every time you use them," he said.
Worrying over this, I later telephoned Neil Crumley, president of Wusthof-Trident of America. "Do I sharpen every time?" he said, repeating my question, clearly stalling for time. Then, Crumley chuckled. "True confession, is no. I do it frequently, but frequently is not every six months, either," he said. "I'd guess I sharpen about every half-dozen uses or once a week."
This seemed doable.
As my class ended, I thought of Harold - who's probably shopping for curry powder in Mumbai right now - and how I'd belatedly made his praise legitimate. As if reading my mind, Weinstein held his sharpened tool up above his head, its steel glistening like Excalibur. "You know what Jimmy Stewart would say about this?" he asked. "It's a wonderful knife."
Everyone groaned, then cut out of there
And some good info on the cost of making Cutco can be found here:
Way, way over priced. Don't get me wrong there is a market for virtually every grade of knife.
Just IMO, as a mechanical engineer for over 26 years, that among other things, designed and developed industrial manufacturing equipment and production lines, I feel that the quantities these are produced in, the processes used to fabricate the blades, and the highly touted "Thermo Resin" scale handles are way over priced.
Examples-
Blade Blanking;
Stamping dies, fed with coiled slit strips of the 440A, slow 60, fast 220, die hits a minute, two / three station die that punches holes and blanks blade after first hit finishes a blanked blade with each hit. Daily production (at industry standard 80% efficacy)slow press 23,040, fast press 84,480, blades per shift. Materials cost in these quantities, $0.40 - $0.60 US per.
Highly touted "Thermo Resin" scale handles;
A friend asked me "What exactly is Thermo Resin and how good is it really
for a knife handle material?
Here is the answer I gave him.
It's sales hype.
They can't outright lie so they tell the truth in a manner not
understandable by someone not informed.
Break it down;
Thermo = heat, so "Heated"
Resin (as pertains to these knife scales)= any of a large class of synthetic
products that have some of the physical properties of natural resins but are
different chemically and are used chiefly in plastics.
So, basically, plastic. (of one sort or another)
Stick em together and you have "Injection Molded Plastic" THE ABSOLUTE CHEAPEST METHOD AND MATERIAL COST THERE IS PERIOD. With a large injection mold common for this sized item there are probably 250 - 500 pieces in a mold batch 125 - 250 handles, 2% will be scraped and re-melted for the next batch. production time will run about 12 to 18 minutes in an industry standard type cooled jacket injection mold. With one mold running at the normal 80% efficiency that's 25 batches per shift that's about 4800 handles per shift.
Resin examples;
acrylic resin, epoxy resin, phenolic resin, vinyl resin, and the OLD one,
melamine. Ask your mother about Melamine or the sales name Melamak , she probably had dishes made of this stuff. (My friend isn't old enough to remember Melamak . :-)
I could go on with the conveyered heat treating ovens that would harden and draw each blade in these quantities (thousands at a time) that takes 14 20 minutes through the oven. Or the automated grinding equipment that would provide the side angles, the electro polishing process, the
automated/semi-automated pin placement inside the rivet presses, the
automated packaging equipment and shipping labeling systems.
So, as I said IMO, for an item (each) that has between $1.12 - $2.50 in
materials overhead, probably $0.80 - $0.90 in equipment overhead, and at
these costs, maybe a burdened labor overhead of $2.50 - $3.00, at a
manufactured cost of $4.42 to $6.40, to have an average manufacturers retail of $78.90 per knife is WAY over priced. :-)
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=group=rec.knives&selm=8u4bk4%2463o%241%40slb3.atl.mindspring.net