The Complete Knife Guide: Types, Steel, Care & Buying Tips

Most kitchen accessories are bought on impulse, only to be used twice or thrice. Our guide helps you create a short list of the top accessories to buy, those that you are likely to work with weekly. Kitchen accessories are...

Before you buy any kitchen accessory, check five things: what it is made of, how well it is built, how it feels in your hand, how hard it is to clean, and whether you have a place to store it....

The way to care for most kitchen accessories is to wash them by hand with warm water and mild soap, dry them right away, and store them where air can reach them. Wooden items need occasional oil, metal items need...

Professional chefs buy kitchen accessories for speed, durability, and sanitation, and home cooks should buy them for versatility, space, and how often they will actually use them. The overlap is smaller than most gear lists suggest: a few core tools...

The grilling tools worth owning are a good pair of locking tongs, an instant-read thermometer, a long thin spatula, a grill brush or scraper, and heat-resistant gloves. Everything else is a convenience. The rest of your outdoor kitchen is built...

The best cutting board for a good knife is a wood end grain board or a soft rubber or plastic one, and the worst is glass, marble, or stainless steel. Your cutting board decides how long your edge lasts. A...

Kitchen shears are heavy-duty, food-safe scissors built to cut through chicken joints, herbs, parchment, and packaging, and they are one of the most versatile tools in a drawer that can replace a knife for several jobs. Regular scissors can cut...

The best cutting board for a good knife is a wood end grain board or a soft rubber or plastic one, and the worst is glass, marble, or stainless steel. Your cutting board decides how long your edge lasts. A...

The best chef knife set is the one built around the cooking knives you will actually use: a chef's knife, a paring knife, and a bread knife as the foundation, one to three specialists on top, all cut from one...

A chef knife set doesn't dull because it gets used — it dulls because of what happens between uses. The wrong cutting board, a few trips through the dishwasher, and a drawer instead of a block will take a $300...

Four things determine whether a chef knife set is actually good, and none of them is the brand name on the box: the steel, the handle and balance, the tang construction, and the warranty terms. Everything else — piece count,...

The best chef knife set brand isn't the one with the longest reputation or the biggest marketing budget — it's the one whose steel, edge geometry, and price actually match how you cook. Wüsthof and Zwilling lead the German school:...

Budget comparisons for chef knife sets are everywhere. What's missing from most of them is the honest answer to the question underneath the comparison: what does more money actually buy? The jump from a $75 knife set to a $200...

The best chef knife sets by piece count are usually not the sets with the biggest number on the box. For most home cooks and cooking enthusiasts, the smartest way to judge a set is by how many actual cooking...

Walk into any kitchen store and you're immediately confronted with the knife block: fifteen pieces, matching handles, impressive footprint, reasonable price per knife when you do the math on the tag. It looks like a complete solution, razor sharp kitchen...

Damascus steel knives are the most visually distinctive cutting tools in any kitchen — and the most misrepresented. The flowing, layered patterns catch every eye. The history embedded in the name stretches back over two thousand years. The performance, when...

Damascus steel has a story unlike any other material in the history of metallurgy. It begins in ancient India with a steel so unusual that craftsmen half a world away could not reproduce it. It travels through the trade routes...

Damascus steel knives are beautiful. The flowing patterns, the layered construction, the history embedded in every blade — all of it is genuinely compelling. But beautiful and worth it are different questions, and the knife market has enough marketing noise...

A Damascus steel knife is one of the few kitchen tools that actively rewards attentiveness. Not high-maintenance attentiveness — a few extra seconds after each use, a consistent routine, and an understanding of what the knife actually needs. Get that...

Buying a Damascus steel kitchen knife should be simple. It is not and the reason is that the modern Damascus steel knife market is uniquely divided between genuinely excellent knives and convincingly packaged disappointments. The beautiful patterns of Damascus steel...

When asking Damascus steel knives types, you actually asking two questions in one — and most guides answer only one of them. The first question is about construction: what kind of Damascus steel is the knife made from? Carbon Damascus,...