My kit of Japanese knives ... WIP

[NeilS]

The Watanabe gyuto that you recommended to me Neil is still providing sterling service.

Good oh!

As an aside, I'm in a rented house that has couple of Victorinox knives with moulded plastic handles, and the steel in those is plenty hard and the blades quite thin. Pretty good value.

Agreed, those little Victorinox pointed paring knives are very good performers for the price. I have a few of them and prefer them for hand held paring. I like the thin blades for that use and the Japanese don't make a thin unclad blade like that because of the brittle nature of their knife steels. One of the additional features of those little Victorinox knives is that they come in a number of handle colours that can identify its use or user... we have some his and her colours!

Like all Western knife steels, they do need to be resharpened far more frequently than J-knives, but are good quality Swiss steel at an affordable price.

Had a small Global parer that held an edge no better, cost 10x more and blade snapped off when someone knocked it off the bench.

Still have a small Shun VG-Max parer. It's a good looking knife and holds an edge OK for a VG steel, but its cladding makes it too thick in a parer for my liking. Got it initially for my wife, but its handle was too heavy for her, so it sits unused on the knife rack. For small work she will use a Victorinox instead. The Shun was expensive for a 'manufactured' knife and the V10 from IKEA would do the same job for far less... and if you didn't like the fat handle on that you could take the grinder to it to profile it down without grimacing at the cost of 'vandalising' it...

[rsser]

I gave a Global parer to my son. In short order it developed pits in the blade and that apparently isn't all that uncommon.