Tips on buying a knife set

A good knife set is going to cost at least a couple hundred dollars. The fort knives are heavier and more expensive, those will cost about $75 a piece because they are made of moulded and hammered steel. Step knives means they are cut from a sheet of metal and those cost about $40 a piece. When you go to look at a set, what you will find is that some knives start out hard and stay harder longer. They are actually harder to get back to their true edge. You will see brands on the market that are well known, but they are difficult to hone or to sharpen again. You want to always work with sharp knives, so that's an important thing. You want to get the hardest knife you can out on the market simply for the reason that they won't get as dull as quickly. There is a hardness scale and on the low end of the scale is stainless steel. Stainless steel is carbon that is coated or made with chromium. Then you go up from that to high carbon steel, which is harder, and then above that is titanium. Above that is carbide; above that there is advanced ceramic, which is your zirconium oxide and that is the hardest steel. The only thing that is harder is diamond. Our knives are actually sharpened on a diamond wheel.

So when you are looking at knives, you can get lower-end knives but those are going to be soft knives. They are made from softer materials. They are going to rust and they are going to pit and you are going to see them getting dull very quickly, so you need to sharpen them more often and keep them sharp. A lot of people don't consider that when they are purchasing a knife, but if you go to a harder product, then you are going to have less sharpening to do and you won't have to hone it quite as often. That's why chefs hone their knives every time they use them. Chefs are very good about caring for their knives and getting them sharpened often, but most people don't like that. Kyocera actually offers a complimentary re-sharpening service and you send the knives in to us and you will pay only for the shipping and handling. We sharpen them on the diamond wheel in Irvine, California and then send them back to you. That process takes about a week. People really love the service because they just come back in the mail and they get a new factory edge and they are off to the races again.

They quickly become people's favorite because most of the time you are going to be doing chopping in the kitchen. You will cut vegetables for a salad or an omelet, so it makes sense to use a knife that offers really incredible edge retention because the material is so hard and its going to stay sharp for a very long time. The other types of knives you need to pick out are boning and carving knives. For example if it is Thanksgiving, we recommend that you pull out the boning knife or carving knife and use that instead of a steel knife. You would use that because the softer flexing allows you to twist that knife.

Stainless steel and high carbon steel come in complete sets. You can get them for several hundred dollars. You will see knife sets for like $99 or you will also see high-end sets that go for literally a hundred times that price. It's an amazing discrepancy and again, it depends on how the knives are made. That's what makes the difference.