I'm a bit surprised to see how much snark there is in the comment sections of this video. The requests for "let's see an independent chef use this knife to do real kitchen work" make total sense, but the moralizing around e-waste and losing fingers etc feels off balance.
People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives, of course there's a viable market for sharper kitchen knives. And for e-waste, you are never going to make meaningful progress by telling consumers to feel bad for buying fun things. The problem is so much bigger than that, the energy is better spent in a different place.
This is a cool and novel tool, at least as far as its genuine utility can be verified. It doesn't seem harmful to let people get excited about it.
>People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives...
What amazes me is how many people spend absolutely zero time sharpening knives, using decades-old knives that have never been sharpened and can't even cut through cucumbers.
Such people should perhaps consider a ceramic-bladed knife. They stay sharp basically forever because the blade is extremely hard, with the downside that it's not repairable with ordinary equipment if chipped. But if the owner would never maintain their metal knife anyway, then it's not _really_ a downside.
On hard material and when overloaded, they will chip in large, unfixable chunks.
On softer material, they continuously sharpen their edges at a microscopic scale, fracturing away tiny chips as they're worn, to new glassy ceramic molecular edges. A well used ceramic blade becomes micro-serrated.
This sounds fantastic until you think about what is happening to the shards of hard glassy ceramic which briefly become part of your food before becoming part of your gastrointestinal tract.
How much mineral and metal grit does one consume on a regular basis? The ceramic material from a ceramic knife blade is, obviously from just looking at it, very small. I bet the amount of grit I've eaten from having a taste for raw oysters vastly outweighs what I'd get from a lifetime of using ceramic knives.
If your body didn't have ways to deal with sharp things you eat, we'd never eat fish due to the risk of pin bones. Microscopic shards of ceramic pose very little risk.
People can work up to eating fairly large shards of glass. Eating tiny bits of ceramic occasionally are unlikely to be an actual issue any more than ingesting a little bit of sand.
Glass eating is a real thing with a surprising number of documented cases. In some cases it’s classified as Hyalophagia a form of Pica where people focus on glass, but it doesn’t necessarily have significant negative side effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder)
There’s also a magic trick where people eat sugar that’s very clear and looks like glass, but that’s a different thing.
No, I’m saying some mentally ill people consume vast quantities of glass and medical professionals are only concerned with the most extreme cases. It’s like saying the forces involved in a boxing match are a useful benchmark for brain trauma, on that scale a 6 month old infant punching you is so far below that benchmark you don’t need to worry about it.
Which means if you’re worried about consuming 1/100,000th as much it’s clearly not a big deal.
I used to be a fan, and used them heavily for years. They stay sharp... for a while, and then there's no practical way to re-sharpen them. You get a couple good years out of them and then a lot of mediocre to bad years.
Running a steel knife through an electric sharpener once a month (a 2-minute operation) keeps it feeling consistently like new.
It's cheaper than an electric sharpener and doesn't carry the risk of taking off too much material from a blade due to overenthusiastic use.
I am 100% certain that there are multiple people on this thread that could tell me I'm getting less optimal results than their tools and/or method. I don't care. I'm getting results that work when I cook. I don't trust myself to get the angle right with a diamond stone.
Pull through sharpening creates an edge that does not last. This channel has great explanations about this and what to do instead: https://youtu.be/pagPuiuA9cY
That is an amazing video. I can confirm that the methods are correct, he mentions exactly what I've been doing for years, explains and demonstrates very clearly.
I have one, I use it on my knives every 1-2 months. My knives will last decades rather than "lifetime" but I don't care... they're always sharp and I don't have to work at it. I can buy new knives.
People worry that they will ruin their knives in an attempt to sharpen them. They don't know that they always have the backstop of going to a competent kitchen store and having them sharpened there. I worry about ruining knives with a cheap sharpener I got at IKEA. So I don't buy super expensive knives. I buy commercial grade knives from Dexter and Mercer. I sharpen them to the best of my ability. The results are no doubt inferior to an expert sharpening them, but they're far better than no sharpening or settling for serrated knives.
Keeping knives sharp is just obscure enough of a skill to elude most home cooks. Videos that tell you to judge the angle for sharpening a knife unaided don't help.
I am by no means an expert at sharpening knives but I can get my knives to razor sharp edges on a 20 dollar whetstone and an old pair of jeans glued onto a piece of plywood with some polishing compound on it as a strop. really isn't rocket science to do it right and it would take decades of daily sharpening(no one does this outside of chefs maybe) to make any kind of noticeable dent in the metal. if you can push it through paper(not just slice it) it's more than sharp enough and even a slicing cut on paper is fine.
Why there isn’t a bigger business selling diamond stones for the kitchen is a mystery to me. Everyone has a honing steel but that won’t grind a new edge like a proper stone.
I think because people rarely even know what a sharp knife is. Once upon a time being able to sharpen a knife was a mandatory skill in life. Right now unless you are woodworker, leatherworker, hairdresser or professional cook - you rarely know what really sharp means. So you can't compare and demand better.
And with families getting smaller and takeout more popular - the prep work in the kitchen has reduced substantially.
You can sharpen (really, burnish) steel knives on a stainless steel sink edge! Stainless steel kitchen sinks are very common in USA.
Gently press the knife blade almost flat against the sink edge and pull the knife handle toward you while moving it to the right (or to the left if you're left-handed). Hold the knife at the angle desired for the blade edge (endless discussions of angle are possible). Of course don't cut yourself.
The motion is similar to that when using a sharpening steel.
Do several times on both sides. Wash and wipe the blade clean. Voila!
A co-worker taught me this trick after I asked how she kept her knife so sharp. I haven't bought or used a knife sharpener since.
That will knock the burs straight but won't really sharpen the knife (much like a honing rod). After a single use or two your knife will be just as dull as before you knocked the burs straight.
I know I'm setting myself up for being picked up, but... I use an older knife that I've never sharpened outside of "occasionally" running it back and forth against a tough fabric. It cuts literally everything just fine; cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, etc. Nothing about my use of it _seems_ unsafe; but I expect that's partially because I don't cut very fast. Cooking, when I'm involved, tends to be "social time", where we prep and chat at the same time; so there's no rush.
I'm not saying it's not a good idea to sharpen knives, but a lot of people make it sound like you're a dangerous monster if you don't. And that just doesn't seem to be the case.
My parents are the same and honestly the sharpness is fine for how they use their knives. I don’t know for yours but theirs don’t cut just fine at all. They barely cut. It’s ok if you actually have to think and push through each cuts but a complete no go for any serious cutting.
It’s a huge waste of time because it prevents any kind of fast work but they don’t know how to safely work with a knife anyway so they don’t notice. My father immediately cut himself the only time I actually sharpened so I stopped trying.
Anyway an ultrasonic knife seems like a cool idea. The technology is common in industrial setting for cutting. I think it’s cool to bring it to a kitchen knife even if it always remains a gimmick.
> outside of "occasionally" running it back and forth against a tough fabric.
As I understand it, that's technically stropping, not sharpening, but it should be sufficient to keep an already-sharp blade sharp over the long term as long as the blade doesn't see extremely heavy use.
That said, most people don't strip their blades any more than they sharpen them.
I’ve seen people use knives on glass cutting boards and granite countertops (directly). They quickly became… not knives? Pieces of pointed sheet metal?
I don’t know, what do you call a previously perfectly fine knife which now is unable to perform any knife like action?
For some reason my daughters love to use my decent knives to cut food on top of ceramic plates and they frequently get tomato crushing dull. I bought an overpriced sharpener that had excellent reviews (from actual knife sharpeners not just Amazon customer reviews) that I think may be a counterfeit from Amazon. I think I just need to learn to sharpen well with stones and hide my knives better.
A dull knife can still cut. I’ve run across ones so dull they couldn’t cut clear tape on packages. Literally just grabs the tape and it rips off . Like I used my finger.
We moved house recently and I bought some new knives for the kitchen. My wife is now constantly cutting herself because she has no intuition for how sharp a knife should be. I can’t really imagine what the safety argument is against dull knives.
People say this a lot but the dull knives I have won’t cut my hands around the force required to cut, say, veg. My sharp knife will cut my hand at extremely low levels of force. Also the direction the dull knives can slip is usually along the surface of what I’m cutting which would almost always be away from my hand.
The knives I consider dull will absolutely cut me if I do something dumb, and I'm much less likely to do something dumb when the blade goes straight through what I'm cutting without having to use any force.
I guess it also depends how and what you're cutting. I sure wouldn't try to julienne carrots with a knife that doesn't easily slice through the carrot.
When a large force is applied unintentionally to a finger we have the problem.
With a dull knife you need to apply a larger force than with a sharp knife.
[The video illustrates this with breaking the skin of the tomato.]
For a normal cut this is not a problem.
But - if the knife slips and a large force is applied at the same time - then you will get a large cut.
If the knife slips and a small force is applied, you will get a smaller cut.
If the probability of slipping is the same for sharp and dull knifes,
then due to the forces applied, the cuts you get with a sharp knife are less dangerous.
Have you never used a knife like this? I’ve got one that’s been used by people on plates enough that it’s dull - I can press it into my fingers and pull back and forth and it won’t cut me with pretty reasonable pressure. With more pressure if it’s a glancing thing it’ll not take off a knuckle. I’ve just used it so that I could say this but chopping up a cucumber is totally fine and easy. I can’t cut like I can with my actually sharp knife but it’ll cut stuff.
A dull knife you cannot control, is slides across the surface, it can slip. Try cutting onions with a dull knife. You will cry yourself out of the room.
Sorry for the slow reply; it's noticeable in practice. I'm pretty sensitive, and it's usually a good indication that it's time to sharpen knives when I start crying a lot. Sharpening generally improves my onion-cutting experience, unless it's a particularly pungent bag of onions.
I don't use knives in my kitchen. My romantic partner does. Yesterday I decided to cut some tomatoes only to find out that all knives are dull.
She never said anything, I didn't know it. Why?
Because she is just "used" to it and to her these knives were just fine. So she never thought about sharpening knives in the first place.
I will take those knives to a pro and he will sharpen them for me, as in a rental I stay in, I don't have the tools to do that and as I said in another comment - I don't have a pain free process to do that as I don't do it often.
You don't really need "tools" to sharpen knives. You just need a harder surface and some experience. It's one of those things that once you learn you can accomplish with a variety of "tools" because you're just trying to achieve an end goal. There's zero reason you can't sharpen a knife in a rental, lol. You don't need a belt grinder or anything.
People get way too caught up in buying into systems and being told how to do things because it alleviates some anxiety of trying something new. Sharpening knives hasn't really changed much in the last few centuries. Watch a few guides and learn to do it. There's no substitute for experience here. It's also a very transferable skill so it's one that used to be taught in schools but no longer is.
When I was in school (in seventies), all boys at least tried to learn how to use and take care of all sharp tools and machines with one up to wood and metal lathe. When I was in school now as a teacher, scissors were the only somewhat sharp things kids were allowed to use. Risk tolerance is so low in our society nowadays, sense of responsibility of children is nonexistent etc.
A semester of machine shop taught me an immense amount, and based on my experience with a lot of techies, 95% more about how the world (and tools) work than 95% of the population.
when I was poor I used to make pricy shaving blades last for months longer than they should have by rubbing them on some old jeans. I don’t remember where I learned it but my roommates thought I was crazy til they tried it.
If she's not used to sharp knives you're not doing her a favour by getting them crazy sharp.
Just get a cheap knife sharpener (not a whetstone) with good reviews and sharpen them a bit once every few weeks, it takes a minute, gets good results, and you can work with her on how sharp they should be.
Most of the time knives that are too sharp are much more dangerous than knives that are too blunt. The people worrying about your knife slipping into your finger have never actually used a knife imo. If it's dull enough to be slipping you'll get a welt before you get cut.
> Most of the time knives that are too sharp are much more dangerous than knives that are too blunt.
With a sharp knife, you cut through food very easily so you use very little force. You also use techniques that prevent you from getting hurt, such as the claw ( https://www.thekitchn.com/knife-skills-the-claw-75998 ).
But if someone has used a dull knife for most of their life, they may not have cultivated these skills and may hold their knife in an unsafe way and or use a lot of force when cutting.
For someone like that, a sharp knife could be a lot more dangerous, but if they're trained/using it properly, a sharp knife is a lot more safe as it reduces effort and chance of the knife slipping.
My thought process was that anyone who is trained or interested would seek to get them sharpened.
I've been in this position and my partner at the time decided to use a separate set of knives from me, as my sharp knives made her focus on the danger and pulled her out of her zoned out cooking-with-a-glass-of-wine mood.
Fair enough, how she approaches tools isn't my decision.
Respectfully, proper technique is just a matter of searching and reading for 2-3 minutes followed by a bit of practice and repetition to get fast. You can skip the getting fast part if you want. Nobody needs "training" to become proficient with a kitchen knife.
She doesn't care. It's not possible to force someone to be a gear nerd.
She cooks, she enjoys it, she does it with a medium sharp knife that doesn't slip because that's not a real thing, and isn't scaring her because it's just medium sharp.
How do you not use knives? Do you use some other cutting instrument, that has the same problem as knives (cutting edge needs sharpening at times), do you only purchase pre-sliced food, do you only order take out, or only eat food that never needs cutting, or do you eat food that many or most people would cut in some way (oranges, apples, celery, etc.) by refusing to cut but using your teeth to separate out parts.
Do you not use butter knives or have you removed those from the category knives as their purpose is not really cutting (although I use butter knives to cut cherry tomatoes and garlic as they have no problem with that task)
I'm not trying to harass here, I am just incredibly interested by this statement as I don't think I've ever seen a kitchen without knives (excepting apartments that did not have any residents at the time)
As the parter who does most of the cooking, I'd be pretty annoyed if my parter took it upon themselves to get all my knives sharpened (unless they asked me first and I enthusiastically agreed).
>> I will take those knives to a pro and he will sharpen them for me, as in a rental I stay in, I don't have the tools to do that and as I said in another comment - I don't have a pain free process to do that as I don't do it often
Do you also replace your elderly relatives' Windows XP with linux distros, because linux is a better OS?
The moment you return the sharpened knives to your partner and she starts using them, she'll cut herself, with a small probability for a serious cut that will leave permanent damage to her hand.
DMT Diamond Sharpeners are fun, especially the ones where you have a milled steel plate that's very flat to which the diamond abrasive is fixed via some nickelplating process. Use one thats "extracoarse" on one side and "fine" (600grit) on the other plus another onsided one with extra fine. Finish with japanese whetstone (synthetic one) and or polishing pashe on a strap of leather. Takes almost no space, can be done at the kitchen table. The equipment costs some, so its probably mostly worth it if you like doing it - sharpening has a meditative quality (wear theowaway gloves)
Yes. These are awesome. They have ones that fold up inside an attached plastic cover (like leatherman) that are great for apartment living, and will sharpen pretty much anything, from filet and paring knives to axes.
This is all very defeatist. Learn to sharpen your knives for your own sake and your... romantic partner. It's a very basic life skill that you should know.
I've never seen a knife like that where I live, in California. The only small serrated knifes people here have are stake knives and on rare occasions sausage knives.
It's strange how two relatively similar cultures can have such oddball differences.
This is while living in California's Central Valley, where a third of the world's tomatoes are grown, so it's not like tomatoes aren't a major part of the culture here.
I wonder if it's because most of California's settlement was within the last 200 years, with modern metallurgy making it common for knifes to hold their edge long enough to easily cut tomatoes with only occasional sharpening, negating the need for a special knife just for tomatoes.
Nationwide advertisements for knives show people using straight-bladed knives for cutting cucumbers and tomatoes, despite stated stake knives being extremely common, so tomato knives are likely rare throughout the country, not that much of the country is any older than California.
You can't sharpen a serrated knife, though. When it becomes irritating to cut tomatoes with my straight knife, I know it's time to sharpen it—that's how I avoid getting used to a dull knife.
It’s kind of tedious, but you can do it with a tool like the DMT Diafold Serrated Knife Sharpener. On most serrated knives, you will also want to lightly sharped/deburr the other face at an extremely shallow angle using a whetstone that either you don’t care about too much or that is extremely resistant to scratching (e.g. a DMT-style flat stone). If you do that part on something like a traditional Japanese stone, you will make a mess.
I've tried sharpening knives a few times in my life and I've never been able to tell the difference. I agree with the principle, but in practice I simply haven't witnessed it matter.
I've had the same experience with the pull through sharpeners, but I bought a cheap 2-sided Japanese waterstone and learned to use it (not very well) and the difference it makes is very noticeable despite my lack of skill. It does however take me maybe 15 minutes to sharpen a knife.
most people don't even know how to properly hone a knife since there are specific movements.
i would recommend anyone sending their knives to a professional for sharpening -- you will feel much more confident cutting, and everything will be safer.
It's not really that hard to learn how to hone a knife. There's different techniques that work and I'd think anyone who loves to cook regularly hones their knives anyway.
Now, sharpening is a bit of a different story but also totally achievable with a little investment (money for some stone(s) and time for practice). But you're right, if you cannot be bothered to do that yourself, it's definitely better to have your knives sharpened professionally than to use dull knives in the kitchen.
Yes, and like all other skills that take practice, most people are miserable at it. If you honestly think the opposite, I think maybe we live on different planets.
This isn’t how it works. Duller blades are more dangerous because when you cut with a dull blade you have to push harder and then that blade can do things you’re not anticipating.
Have you spent any serious time in the kitchen? Sharp blades are incredibly important for… cutting.
I agree, but this is more about stopping when you get hurt. I cook everyday and hurt myself only with very sharp knifes as I couldn't feel when the knife was about to cut my skin.
For trained chefs, the sharper blade means things stay in place as expected, because the weight and motion of the blade are cutting, and not force exerted.
Related: I watch chefs use a mandolin, no freaking way I'd use it the way they do. I just do not have the skills necessary to free hand it. I will use a safety glove and/or a guard.
> People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives
With a mass market electric sharpener and a reasonable knife I spend maybe 15 minutes/yr on sharpening and the knife + sharpener costs less than half this product
The marketing video seems to try to head people like me off, but it also seems to wildly overstate the level of commitment required to have sharp knives
(I do think the tech is cool tho. I just wouldn’t pay $400 for an 8 inch chef’s knife no matter how good it is)
To embrace a stereotype, there are two types of people in the kitchen: Tool enthusiasts and food enthusiasts.
The tool enthusiast has beautiful Japanese steel knives treated as family heirlooms; the knives are sent out for professional sharpening once or twice a year.
The food enthusiast has a pile of fibrox knives and a chef's choice electric sharpener. The knives go through the sharpener once a month and the dishwasher daily; the knives get replaced every decade or two.
The tool enthusiast's knives are pretty, but the food enthusiast's knives always pass the paper test.
Nobody has ever complemented me "wow, this meal was prepared with such pretty knives!"
Most people I know never sharpen their knives. My grandmothers (both of whom cooked for all branches of the family every day when I was a kid) never did. I think if a knife got too dull they simply chucked it out and got a new one. And probably cut themselves a few times until it got dulled enough.
Anyway that's three kinds of people: two kinds of foodies, and everyone else.
How can you know your grandmothers never sharpened it? In my experience grandmothers tend to have a steel lying in a drawer and use it at least before cutting through expensive meat. And they use professional sharpening services once in a year. You wouldn’t actually notice as a child.
Yeah, sorry my comment was a bit misleading. I spent a lot of time around my grans when I was a kid, and later as a young adult and a ... less young adult? We lived in the same houses (two, because my parents were divorced). They didn't sharpen knives. They both took great pride in their cooking, but they would just stare at you if you asked them about things like knife skills or mise en place. They were Greek housewives not French chefs.
I'm pretty sure we didn't have "professional sharpening services" either, when I was growing up in Greece. I think I've seen men with whetstones on their backs in old movies, or paintings, but I've never seen anyone like that live. Nor do I remember any shop that did that sort of work.
Why is it so hard to believe that housewives rarely sharpen knives? It even rhymes.
Maybe they understood you better if you didn't insist on speaking french? Arranging your ingredients when mixing them comes pretty naturally to most people even if they don't know a fancy phrase for it.
I use it 1-2 times a month for 30 seconds on the 2 knives I use in the kitchen. They pass the paper test. Previously, I used the bottom of a coffee mug.
That being said, thinks like [0] do exist and people seem to buy them.
No need to be ashamed, if it works it works. Whetstones look cooler but they do the same job. I actually bought the same device at a local knife store for my parents and the clerk said it was perfect if you just want to get sharp knives and be done with it. Whetstones or professional sharpening is more useful for pros or knife hobbyists/enthusiasts.
In the comments it reveals this guy is using the sharpener wrong by doing way too many pulls with too much pressure.
The cheap ikea one is fine, it will not wear out your blade. 2-3 pulls at very light pressure, no need to learn how to use a whetstone properly, perfect UX for those who don’t typically sharpen knives.
The video provides no test of the unsharpened sonic knife performances, so any claim made are instintively fishy marketing, however cool the product may be, it was fresh out of packaging, what happens once the blade is dull? If we have to sharpen it it instantly loses all it's value.
also, no test on power armor, I don't think they have identified their core market.
> ...you are never going to make meaningful progress by telling consumers to feel bad for buying fun things.
I think it's a worthwhile message to tell folks that we, collectively, should be mindful about the resources we consume and the waste we produce. For such razor-thin (lol) gains in QoL, I think it's worth reminding people to consider whether it is worth the huge increase in waste. Knives are metal and wood/plastic... awfully efficient tools for the work they get done.
EDIT: And to balance the negativity, I _love_ the Seattle Ultrasonics logo.
I'm surprised there isn't moralizing about the price point. I don't see why the US is so far behind in manufacturing efficiency. Everything seem to be 10-100x the cost of comparable Chinese goods, and US labor isn't paid anywhere close to 100x more.
Why would manufacturing cost come into play? Isn't it a given that a company will charge as much as they can get away with charging? Cost of labor and material I understood to only matter at the absolute bottom of a highly commoditized market e.g., bolts or capacitors or whatever. This is the only consumer ultrasonic knife (as far as I know) so they can charge whatever.
Eh, it's pretty clear this price point isn't driven by manufacturing. It's driven by being a bespoke item with tons of R&D costs that need to be recouped.
If this turns into a significant market, I'm sure the cost will plummet.
> I'm a bit surprised to see how much snark there is in the comment sections of this video.
It's "slashdot talks about the iPod announcement" all over again.
Unfortunately, communities tend to devolve other time into empty cynicism and negativity, and it's hard to stop, since obviously you don't want to ban 100% of cynical or negative comments.
Concerns about safety aren't moralising, and this isn't just a "sharper kitchen knife".
First, on sharpness, it takes me about 15 minutes once a week to sharpen my cleaver, two chef's knives, paring knife and breadknife. I could spend another half an hour or so and get them to razor sharpness, but I don't because I don't need or want that level of sharpness for kitchen work. Therefore, while something that eliminates that 15 minute task could be of value to me (though personally I rather enjoy the process), something that provides a sharper edge is not.
Secondly, even if I were to use razor-sharp knives, there's a limit to the damage they will do to my hands in a typical accident. In particular, even a razor sharp knife will usually stop at the bone. I don't know if this knife will because this advert didn't address safety at all, but given ultrasonic knives are used for cleanly cutting through bones in surgery [1] it's reasonable to suspect it might not. Adding to my chef's knives the ability to smoothly pass all the way through my finger would not be an upgrade in my view [2].
Lastly, to raise questions about a product's safety is not "moralising". If I were to say that you shouldn't use this knife because of safety concerns, that could be viewed as a moral position, but I don't care about that at all. You can use chainsaws and flamethrowers in your kitchen for all I care. When I say I would be unlikely to buy this thing without some information on what it will do to my hand in the event of a kitchen accident, that's just a choice I am free to make as a consumer.
[2] As it is, I have what seems to be permanent scarring and some loss of sensation on my left thumb from cutting it to the bone with my breadknife a year ago, and my mind replays the trauma every time I pick that knife up. (No, the knife was not blunt. It was brand new at the time, and I've since maintained it to the same level of sharpness it had then, using a ceramic sharpening rod and a whetstone for the tip. The accident was due to me being distracted and positioning my hand incorrectly. And yes, better technique would have prevented it, but I'm not and never will be a trained chef. Had I used this ultrasonic knife I expect I would have taken the end of my thumb off.)
Overall agree it seems cool, and maybe interesting.
"People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives,"
The former, totally agree - i've seen people buy a tormek to do basic knife sharpening (not grinding), which is like swatting a fly with an $800 hammer.
The latter, do you mean overall, or in a sitting or what?
I've certainly seen people on various forums go nuts, and then you have hertzmann staring at knife edges with an SEM, but even if i did it completely by hand with shaptons, it takes like 15 minutes, max, to sharpen 10 knives, through an entire insane grit progression (which i do for plane blades when i need to cleanly slice end grain without going to a super high-angle plane or something. For knives, i was just trying to get a comparison point, i use electric sharpeners in practice).
Or approximately 2 minutes with an electric knife sharpener.
While sure, there is a difference when i put them under my digital inspection microscope, either can slice paper towel cleanly and easily (slicing paper is easy, slicing paper towel ends to be hard because any burr catches really easily)
Are there really even semi-normal people out there spending hours to sharpen knives?
If so, like, why?
(Obviously, again, if they need to be reground because you knicked it really badly, sure that takes a bit, but beyond that)
None of these steels are tough enough to require all that many strokes (it's pretty easy to test it with a marker and see when you remove the marking), and if you are using super custom steels (RIP Crucible :(), carbide, or ceramics, you need CBN or diamond anyway, but the same is still true - given the correct abrasive material, sharpening knives is just not that slow.
I actually travel with an electric knife sharpener if we are going to be staying in an airbnb somewhere for >1 week and are cooking most nights. It's the most consistent thing about airbnb - no matter what level of luxury, etc, they always have many knives, and all of them are dangerously dull. It still doesn't take more than a few minutes to sharpen them all.
I spend hours every 6 months or so sharpening knifes on whetstones. I like the excuse to have some me time, listen to an audiobook or just do some thinking. Akin to meditation.
I also dont like the blades ruined through automatic sharpeners - the knifes are made of good quality steel, were made to order in Jp, and have sentimental value. I also sharpen the cheap knifes this way, tho - I like manual work.
Do you not sharpen them in between? I've had to spend hours sorting out knives that have been left far too long without sharpening, but my routine is to spend about 15 minutes sharpening them every weekend. Then they're always sharp and never get into a terrible state and need remedial work.
My knives get noticeably suboptimal in a couple of weeks without sharpening, so if I left it 6 months they'd be blunt pretty much all the time.
Usual advice is that you need to straighten your blade every week or two and then you can sharpen it every 6 months or even a year (depends on usage of course). To straighten the blade you use honing rod which many people mistake for sharpener.
I have a steel honing rod but it's never seemed to have much effect. Perhaps my technique isn't right.
I also have a ceramic sharpening rod, which I use to sharpen my breadknife. That's very effective, but different as it actually removes steel. I give my straight-edged knives a few strokes on each side on a 3000 grit whetstone every weekend, which seems to keep them nicely sharp. That will slowly wear them down but it hasn't done so noticeably yet so I expect the knives to last many years.
What should one look for in an electric knife sharpener? It’s hard to search as there’s so much content farming. I’m UK based. Are they worth it compared to a simple “drag through” thing?
But you have to let go of the "ruining it" fear. Sharpening a knife does ruin it, you're taking off a tiny amount of material each time. Since your knife is full bolster, you'll eventually notice a small difference in height of the blade at the bolster.
Yes you will ruin the knife over decades of sharpening. In the mean time you have a wicked sharp knife that's a joy to use (not just look at). It's a tool not an art piece.
Most people can buy an opinel and be happy for decades. You don't need anything fancy for a general purpose knife. $50 max, and that's if you're feeling like getting something special.
Expensive steels are, by and large, incremental progress over cheaper knife steels, provided it got an appropriate heat treatment and has good edge geometry. In almost no applications will an end consumer notice the difference.
I've been using the same thrift store knife I picked up 15 years ago. It gets sharpened maybe once a year, honed every so often. It was like $20 i think? Most chefs I know have a similar story with their knife/knives, something cheap that does the job.
Spending more on knives is just status symbol nonsense, which unfortunately has infected absolutely everything. It's like spending $300 on a spanner wrench. Who in the hell spends that much on a wrench? Why would you spend that much on a knife? lol. It's what you do with it that matters.
I remember seeing a comment by a local "celebrity chef" where he said he never sharpens cleavers - he just buys a specific inexpensive brand 5 at a time for $8 each and throws them away when they become dull.
While I don't agree with externalising the manufacture/disposal costs with that sort of disposable consumption, I do see the economically-rational decision making behind it.
If you're running a restaurant in Australia, your lowest paid kitchen staff get $24 an hour during weekdays, 30-35 and hour on weekends, and as much as $55 an hour on public holidays. And if they work more than 8 hours in a day it's 1.5 times those rates for the first 2 hours of overtime, and double those rates for anything more than 2 hours overtime. https://www.fairwork.gov.au/find-help-for/fast-food-restaura...
While spending 15 or 20 seconds honing the edge with a sharpening steel during use makes sense (and I'll bet he does that just out of reflex), once the edge gets damaged enough to need more that what a steel can fix and you start needing a whetstone, it's probably not cost effective to have kitchen staff spend time doing that.
If a dull knife takes whole 5 minutes to sharpen, it's 12 knives an hour. At $8 per knife, this is $96 per hour. Not worth it during deep overtime during a public holiday, otherwise...
I suppose someone less handsomely paid collects these disposed knives, sharpens them, and resells them on the side.
I'd take issue with your price point but agree with the sentiment
I've seen victorinox fibrox knives in Michelin Star kitchens, they get the job done and are very reasonably priced ($60 for a chef's knife).
Admittedly the knives I have at home are significantly more expensive largely because the knives I have at home are on display so I want something that looks good and I actually enjoy using them.
On one level it's a little silly but then on another level people spend thousands on art/sculptures which has no useful purpose.
There are lots of great knife makers. Depends on what you want. Knives become about aesthetics and feel pretty quickly, price point wise. Not cutting functionality (ease of cutting, whatever).
Victorinox knives rank very well in just about any real-use ranking I’ve ever seen and are extremely affordable. If you just want good knives that will serve you well, won’t break the bank, and you won’t feel bad using them, that’s what I would do. There are other good recommendations in the thread as well.
As for custom steels - outside of currently very expensive processes (powdered metallurgy, etc), it is basically “maximum sharpness”, “edge retention”, “ease of sharpening”, pick maybe two. Edge retention here is shorthand for both brittleness (chipping) and abrasion resistance (regular wear), even though they differ for some things.
High grade carbide, for example, is extremely tough and resists edge abrasion. But because of the large grain size it is ~impossible to get it as sharp as carbon steel by hand. Additionally, the same abrasion resistance also means you need something hard enough to sharpen it.
If you remember those little scratch kits you may have played with once in science class as a child where you tried to see which rocks scratches other rocks, this is the practical application of that.
Even in metalworking people will often make or use hss cutters when they need something really really sharp or custom. Or just cheap. And use carbide ones when they don’t. Because you really can’t get carbide as sharp as HSS and sometimes it matters. I can also easily make a really good HSS cuttter, but making a really good carbide one would take significantly more expensive tooling and time.
This is one example.
Ceramic knives[1] tend to have very high edge retention, but are very brittle and fracture easily. So it's very easy to nick them. This makes them last forever if you are slicing but not if you are chopping. They are also ~impossible to sharpen without diamonds.
In the end - we can construct steels and other things with very nice properties at high cost, and it's cool and fun to explore the limits there, but it’s not going to make you a better chef, or make your prep 10x faster or whatever. This isn't to say it's completely impossible to make somethign that is awesome at everything, but we use what we use because we can make them without nudging atoms into a matrix one by one :)
So while it's possible to get 5x the edge life out of an impossible to sharpen knife (for example), for most people, it's not worth it. They don't even notice once the novelty wears off.
[1] Tungsten carbide is really a ceramic but people often mistake it for a metal/steel, when in reality it's often just alloyed/glued/etc to metals, etc. Assume i'm not talking about tungsten here.
I admire you. You are a minority, you know that, right?
I don't have time in my schedule at the moment, which says "sharpen the knifes". So for me - it would be amazing if someone solved this problem in a radical way.
Sporadically I would sharpen the knives and since I don't have it in my "skills" section of the brain, I always have to "figure out" sharpening process.
You know you can buy a <$5 gadget you drag the knife across a few times for 10s that gets it about 95% as sharp as a professional job? Zero skill or attention required.
Dont have time in your schedule...jeeze. Sounds like learned helplessness to me. That or spoiled rotten. The comments in this thread help me understand the general animosity towards the tech industry from much of the population.
I have one of those "roller" sharpeners, in theory a "good" one, it's from Global (the Japanese knife brand) not just an AliExpress knockoff.
It works reasonably well and is definitely quick. But its not even close to "95% as sharp) as when I spend 10 mins with my Lansky sharpening kit (which is really just a small set of graduated whetstones with a jig to keep the angle right while using it).
Would I recommend everybody spend $70 or so for a bottom end Lansky kit or similar? No. Not even close. But if cook a lot, and you're going to buy "nice" knives that you intend to keep for decades, and you notice and care about the difference between sharp and dull knives - then I'd suggest you at least consider it.
Admittedly I have not made a comparison but I've seem some youtube vids where they compete various sharpening gadgets vs the pro way. They all seem to do very well even at bottom barrel prices. I'm sure defects are higher though.
That lansky looks awesome I think I'll pick it up. I think the crowd on here will see this basic life skill as too much "work".... so thats why I recommend the cheap drag through's. Safer than a dull knife at least... Weird how so many people here have no issue churning thorough another JS framework but spending 10 min to learn a life skill is too hard.
The roller/drag-through thing is worthwhile owning, I use mine a lot more often than I get out the Lansky kit. It's probably a couple of times a month I'll find my usual knife is smooshing ripe strawberries or tomatos a bit instead of effortlessly slicing them, and a few swipes through the fine wheel on mine will make that knife slice nicely again. Mostly I get out the Lansky tools when I've damaged a knife, then I'll sit at my workbench will all my knives and spend an hour or two in a Zen knife edge grinding trance making everything stupidly/dangerously sharp. The ultra-fine ceramic hone in my kit does an amazing job, but you need to work up to it through the coarser grade hones - especially if you've been using the roller sharpener on that knife for a bit - I'm pretty sure they don't get the edge angles right in a way the the ultras fine hone can take advantage of.
I really like my Lansky kit. In retrospect I might have shelled out the extra for the set with the diamond sharpening stones - but I doubt I'll ever come close to wearing down the regular stones with my use patterns.
> I always have to "figure out" sharpening process.
Get the Worksharp fixed angle sharpener for about $70 (about the price of 2 decent stones). If you're really interested, get the leather strop add on for about $10. Get on with sharpening your kitchen knives. Put it in your closet until next year.
Is it "great"? No. If you want to be a knife nerd, it's not for you.
If you have a couple of kitchen knives you need to sharpen once a year, it's absolutely fine. And you don't have to "get the feel" of sharpening again before you can get sharp kinves.
Even with the stones and equipment I have, it is way more mindless and a lot less messy to simply use a fixed-angle sharpener. Sure, you won't get "The Ultimate Hair Whittling Edge(tm)", but your knives will quite readily Julienne your vegetables.
Reiterating that any sharpener with the ability to set the angle is really all anyone needs if they don't want to invest in the time of learning how to sharpen.
I have the ruixin version and it works fine. I like that I can use the stones without the system.
Sure. Most fixed angle sharpeners work to some degree, I just recommended one that isn't sold by "Random Letter Chinese Shop" and that I have bought and know personally works.
In addition, for the moment, the stones used in the system I recommended are reliably decent and have been analyzed by a bunch of the YouTube knife nerds. The other fixed angle systems can be hit or miss with the stones.
If someone is sufficiently interested that they want to use the stones without the system, they've started down the path to being a knife nerd and have outgrown my recommendation.
In Japan I could just drop my knife in a nearby house's box with $6, they'd sharpen it and phone me to pick it up within a few hours. Cheap enough that I never bothered to do it myself.
This is also make takeaway. I have noticed this more and more on this site. Everything is criticized to an insane degree. If someone hasn't solved world hunger, while at the same time making money and curing their grandma of Alzheimer it will not be received well.
Recycling is a sham. There is mostly no efficient recycling of sufficiently advanced components, the industry just spent decades on making you think you can buy lots of cheap things and all that trash isn’t your problem. Well it is.
With enough energy we can separate anything into its elemental constituents.
“Recycling” as mentioned by the US press is a scam because we had humans walking over our trash in India manually recycling in such a dangerous way they banned our recycling.
Anything can be ground into dust and sent through a series of physiochemical processes to reconstitute.
Well. The "recycling" we’re talking about in this thread is a greenwashing lie to make consumers feel better about their irresponsible consumption.
The recycling you’re talking about is a science fiction trope, and utterly irrelevant here, because we don’t have a way of expending that much energy, let alone generate economically (or ecologically).
Elsewhere on the thread I pointed out that I'd noticed the video doesn't show anybody doing actual prep; making an easy but deliberate thin slice of a tomato is one thing, quickly dicing an onion or a bell pepper is a very different thing.
To that observation I'd add (h/t my Slack friends) this interesting site Seattle Ultrasonics stood up:
One thing I notice here is that Japanese knives (and my trusty MAC) fare really well on the BESS and CATRA scale, but relatively poorly on the "Food Cutting Rank", which is based on an ad-hoc seeming performance scale of how well their robot fared with a bunch of cutting tests that included stuff like bread and cheese (h/t again Slack friends) --- which nobody uses a chef's knife to cut.
That's a weird scale to plot chef's knives across --- unless the purpose of building that scale was to showcase an electronic knife that does well on tasks people don't normally use chef's knives for, but maybe not as well on chef knife daily driver tasks.
A talented chef might cut vegetables at 25hz, while the blade is moving at 44khz. So whatever cutting improvement is conferred by the ultrasonic tech will certainly be applied towards fast cutting. It seems that the main benefit for fast cutting would be that food doesn't stick to the blade.
I'll cut bread with my chef's knife (amazon shun knockoff) when I want to make less of a mess. One interesting thing I noticed is that when Scott was cutting bread in the video he was cutting a croissant and no crumbs fell.
It will be interesting to see the knife in the hands of real chefs. Two things I'm curious about are whether the ergonomics of the button are good, and whether the ultrasonic action atomizes foods as they're being cut, changing the experience of cooking in some way.
I'd really like to see a citation for 25 Hz. It feels to me like a decimal point might be missing. And how does the knife moving at twice the frequency of the vegetables being cut work? do they do two complete cycles of the knife for every cut of the veges? that's not what I've seen watching cooking shows (which might not be the best thing to watch for this to be seen, of course)
25 chops per second would be EXTRAORDINARY. Possible? Probably but only with super elite training. Most competent home chefs can probably do 5 Hz and probably struggle to get to 10 Hz.
Looks like around 12Hz, counting the forward rock and back rock as distinct chops. I'm not sure a rocking motion is what people mean here, though. This only works for mincing something you've already cut up, not slicing an onion.
Maybe the solution is an ultrasonic slap chop? (https://www.amazon.com/Slap-Chop-Stainless-Vegetable-Accesso...) Many slices at once, preserve whatever the ingredient is without crushing it, doesn't stick to the blade. It may sound ridiculous, but if it makes kitchen prep easier and faster, I might cook more.
The sixteenth notes in "Crazy Train"[1] are nominally 552 per minute, or 9.2 Hz. Moving a knife at 10 Hz is probably very difficult. I would expect 2-3 Hz is a normal pace for a skilled knife user and 4-5 Hz is showing off.
That’s where a lot of mess comes from, so I’m very interested in this tech. The worst are cucumbers, they stick to the blade and new slices pop them up and they roll everywhere. I get some better results by slightly angling the blade but it’s not perfect.
The blade quality doesn’t look great but I think any decent cook that knows how to hone will do just fine with it.
I’m not sure I’d spend the money and replace my expensive knives for a relatively rare edge case but it’s a neat innovation that might catch on elsewhere, or maybe they’ll make premium lines.
Technique. Pros use a slicing motion that moves the knife through the food before it detaches, home cooks use 5% of the blade and all the cucumber rounds are stuck to same place on the side of the middle of the knife.
Interesting idea, but I would say that it is orders of magnitude harder compared to having an integrated system. Vibration in such a compact space with a very sharp blade... I want this system be stable around me.
I would say, if this idea becomes popular, knife producers can create their own versions in the new models, or retrofit old knives at the shop.
Yeah, I'm already somewhat skeptical of the whole concept, having DIY'd a vibroblade out of an X-acto knife and a SonicCare toothbrush and finding it to be completely ineffective.[1]
I think trying to make an ultrasonic vibration add-on for regular knives would be even harder to make into a useful product than an integrated knife/transducer.
If the handle is rigidly fixed to the blade, there would be very little vibration. So it seems like the only way to make an add-on would be as a sleeve over the regular handle. That would make for a bulky handle, and it seems like it would need a counterbalancing weight at the back. So the result would be very unwieldy, like one of those electric turkey-carving knives that are basically kitchen hedge-trimmers.
I'm waiting to see what skilled chefs think of this knife. The idea of an ultrasonic vibroblade has always seemed like a neat one to me, and I'd be happy to hear that someone managed to make one that was genuinely useful.
Ultrasonic cutting board. "Are you tired of spending $1800 on a whole set of ultrasonic knives only to have them break every time your Brother in law throws them in a bowl of soapy water after a dinner party? Well know you don't have to. Image buying 6 cheap knives at a garage sale and turning them into chefs quality knives instantly, without even touching a sharpener!"
if you have a nice knife and cut by dragging the knife towards you with tip in contact with the board instead of cutting directly down, food will not stick
The video comparison of this knife cutting through potato compared to a regular one is very enticing. My own experience is that there is more sticking even on my knives that have those scooped out edges that are supposed to prevent sticking.
I'm not saying it can't work, just that they didn't show it, and after the required thin-tomato-slice that's the thing I'd most want to see the knife doing.
Wh...why? I'm not selling anything. I'm just saying dicing an onion is a better test of a chef's knife than taking a single thin slice of a tomato. Seems like that's an argument you can just take on directly.
I don't think there's anything interesting about my onion dice. You'd be seeing a video of a banged up MAC, scraped up from all the times I've casually sharpened it in a hurry, doing the standard one-cross-cut Jacques Pepin onion dice. You know, an onion dice.
(The "Slack friend" thing was just that I felt bad about sharing a link I'd gotten just a few minutes while pretending as if I'd known about it myself. I have no idea their level of expertise! Probably better than mine though.)
I was getting the impression that you are "selling" the fact that the performance of this knife is based on false advertising, and using personal anecodes and some anonymous people as a supporting argument. That's basically the only issue.
Aside from that, in my opinion dicing an onion is a much more simple task for a knife than taking a very thin slice of a tomato. And in both cases it is likely more about the technique/handling and the sharpening than the actual knife material or technology. But the average person does not care about those things, so this knife could at least in principle be something useful for them. Not for someone who is willing to invest some time in the aforementioned things though, like you (and me too, for that matter).
No I genuinely don't know if this is a useful product or not. I think it would be a more interesting world if it was, so I guess I'm rooting for it. But I've got those two indications that I should be wary: nobody really used the knife in the video, and he did that weird knife ranking that happens (in a weird way) to probably favor his new electronic knife.
Well, I can't speak to "false advertising", but the thin slice he did with the tomato and the grape you can just achieve with a well-sharpened knife. Both sides of a whetstone and then a strop will get you there.
As for the sticking, this is solved by vertical fluting already.
Ultrasonic vibration is a complicated solution for a problem that has already been solved by the simple solution of just sharpening your knives. And you don't need to get expensive either. A Sharpal diamond stone, leather strop and a good workhorse knife like a Victorinox Santoku will get you there :)
He acknowledges you can do that with a well-sharpened knife. Of course you can do it with a well-sharpened knife. It's exactly the demo every single sharp knife does! His claim is that the ultrasonic knife will always do that cut, whether or not you assiduously keep it sharp, which is what I have to do with my MAC and Yuki to make it cut tomatoes like that.
But most chef-knife cutting isn't thin tomato slices, and you can always do that cut with a good thin serrated bread knife, too. I want to see it dice an onion. Seems like a small ask.
Yep, I have a Shun with micro serrations ([0]) that will slice a tomato so finely you basically feel no resistance.
The only downside is that you can’t really hone or sharpen it yourself so you have to baby it. I’ve had mine about 15 years and have sent it in one time for their free sharpening at about the 11 year mark. At least Shun blades hold their edge a really long time.
> It will be interesting to see the knife in the hands of real chefs.
Not really? I feel like this is for the other people, the folks who don't have the training to use a chefs knife super well. I'd rather see a decent home cook compare it to their knife in general prep.
"The best tools shouldn't only be accessible to the pros" but his knife costs more than every knife in that database.
The weight is listed in their help articles as 330g. I also think that handle is chunkier than a typical high end chef's knife. It may be easier to cut things with it, but I think your hand and arm are going to get tired of using it more quickly than with a regular knife at ~100g less.
And I realize these fare worse than the high end japanese and german knives, but it's hard to get excited about a $400 knife you can't put in the dishwasher when you can get a perfectly credible fibrox knife for about a tenth of that, which doesn't require charging and can tolerate 'careless home cook' levels of abuse.
You're supposed to keep a glass of water with a bit of chlorine bleach (to obtain roughly 300 ppm) handy for wiping your tools and surfaces down as you work. Not that anyone teaches Home Economics at school any longer.
This is what I learned in cooking school but also never actually saw in practice in restaurants I worked in (which were fine-ish dining in the Bay Area).
Taking a piece of metal or a plate that has any oily or other non-water-soluble food on it, rinsing it, and chlorinating it results in a mess that might indeed be non-infectious but is otherwise disgusting. Also, leaving a piece of stainless steel covered in chloride (which that bleach will turn into) is one of the worst things you could credibly do to it in a kitchen context. (And, while the relevant regulators don’t seem to care about disinfection byproducts in a kitchen, all those residual organics that didn’t get removed plus hypochlorous acid seem like they would thoroughly fail most drinking water standards.)
Also, I don’t know what all the food safety and dishwasher vendors are telling their customers, but that nice residual chlorine has a tasty and odor that is not appetizing at all. But you can also legally disinfect your dishes and such with sufficiently hot water, and you can buy a commercial dishwasher that does that instead of using chlorine.
In a home context, what’s wrong with dish soap and a sponge or brush? In a commercial kitchen that really wants to be compliant could use dish soap followed by a (very) hot rinse. The average household instant hot water tap is plenty hot for this, too, although demonstrably hitting those HACCP targets might be tricky.
I'm not disputing that, and it's kind of my point. Most home cooks (I would bet millions) are not worrying about "the cutting experience" when they are making dinner. They are using a knife to cut up vegetables or slice meat or whatever. Then they are putting that knife in the dishwasher. Not all of them, but most.
I think my other points matter more. I think people who are invested in the experience as you suggest care about more than just the edge and finish, they care about the weight and balance and feel as well. I think this knife is probably worse on those qualities.
I don't mean to say this knife sucks or that this guy is dumb. It's a cool knife, and he's clearly not dumb. I just think this is more a passion project curiosity kind of thing than a useful product addressing a large market need. Maybe a future mass market version (cheaper steel, stamped, more contoured handle) would change my mind.
> Most home cooks (I would bet millions) are not worrying about "the cutting experience"
Indeed, and they won't buy the knife at this price anyway. My point is that not being dishwasher-safe does not matter for ~everyone. If they care, they won't do it; if they don't, they won't buy it.
It's hard to do irreparable damage to the steel of a knife. It's just an inert lump of metal. But you could fuck up the handle. Theoretically, the detergent could dull your edge. If you don't isolate your knife and it rattles around, that'll definitely dull it. Mostly: it should only take a couple seconds to clean off your knife in the sink.
> It's hard to do irreparable damage to the steel of a knife.
It’s easy — just heat it above the tempering temperature of the steel in question. You can achieve this in an ordinary oven for most steels, and you can also achieve it (locally) with a motorized sharpener that isn’t cooled. Don’t take a knife you care about to be professionally sharpened by a person who uses a non-water-cooled power tool.
> It's hard to do irreparable damage to the steel of a knife.
Sadly not impossible, I've 'lost' (they're still in the back of a drawer) two good knives to idiots attempting to pry apart frozen chops and steaks .. each case snapped a good inch from the tip.
Not damage from a dishwasher and not damage the edge I realize, but worth mention as a tale of caution.
The steel used to make the knives is not always stainless, so it can stain or rust. Even stainless is really just stain resistant.
Dishwasher detergent is caustic and corrosive to steel, so over time it can pit the metal and dull the finish. Handles will swell and become loose or deteriorate, either because of wood repeatedly being waterlogged and dried or just from the heat cycling. A loose handle can be unsanitary, unsightly, dangerous, or all three.
You'll often read that knives in the dishwasher will bang around and that will damage the edge. And that it's more likely you will hurt yourself pulling a knife out of the dishwasher vs. cleaning them properly.
Phosphoric acid detergents will pit your blade. If the knife is not a stainless steel, the wash and dry cycle will cause accelerated rusting. In wooden-handled knives with a rat tail tang construction, you can start destroying the handle from the inside out due to gaps in the construction allowing water seepage and degradation. In non-stainless knives, that same construction becomes the point where rust tends to build up.
Then you also have the action of the dishwasher water jets bouncing the knife around, dulling and destroying the edge.
Only the shittiest cheapest plastic-handled knives I own touch the dishwasher. Everything else gets cleaned and wiped by hand and put straight to the knife block or its respective scabbard.
“This has all the hallmarks of a product that’s going to be disappointing but I’m so optimistic it won’t be.”
I’m seriously hopefuls it works because vibroblades (I mean, “progressive knives” and “high frequency blade”) are awesome and the timelines of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Metal Gear are getting closer. Which may, or may not be a good thing.
Well we know this tech works because there are already ultrasonic cutters in medical and industrial equipment. So it’s more about whether they implemented it well, rather than some new fundamental discovery.
I got a wired (usb-c) ultrasonic cutter for around $100 (not this one), and it's amazing for cutting precise holes on electronic project boxes (plastic / abs).
Yes think of it as a more powerful electric toothbrush. There are actually already toothbrush sized ultrasonic knives you can buy online. This just applies the same tech to what largely looks like a normal chefs knife.
Feel free to correct me if I’m off base, but it doesn’t seem like the robot is actually slicing. Looks more like it’s just mashing the blade into the tomato. In this case I can see how the vibration can make up for the lack of slicing action. Ie sliding the blade across the tomato.
My question is: would there still be an improvement if they used a slicing action?
A slight tangent but I find sharpness tests often don’t represent the experience at the macro level, but it’s easily benchmarked and quantified.
As an example are tons of people pushing Feather or Astra or similar ultra sharp shaving razors. I bought a ton of sample packs the ones I liked the most were Kai, which are considered relatively dull, but have properties which make the overall experience better (I recall reading they’re thicker and vibrate less during cutting).
To me that makes this knife cutting benchmark more attractive than sharpness or retention, but I still have questions about technique used in the benchmarks, and how that affects knife performance (e.g. I would never try to cut bread by just pressing down as this move does).
I don’t understand judging a knife by any measure of “sharpness”? Sharpness is what the sharpener brings to the knife. Edge retention is the steel, but the skills of the sharpener (against how easy the steel is to sharpen) are what defines the edge sharpness.
This is mostly just a remark on the fact that BESS is probably just measuring the factory edge… which only matters until it has dulled the first time?
Edge geometry only matters after the initial cut. BESS measures how much force it takes for the knife to cut a calibrated thread.
Carbide size maybe? But mostly I think it changes toothiness (so slicing, not push cutting). Also, I think that affects how hard or easy it is to get a given edge, but not how good the edge (as measured by BESS) can actually be.
Maybe it changed since you posted it, but right now the top 3 knives there by "Food Cutting Rank" are Japanese (Shun, Moritaka, Tojiro), with a Wuesthof coming in at 4th?
All of the Japanese brands I recognized were in the top 10 (out of 21) with the MAC being exactly in the middle.
I also noticed that while they show the traditional knives struggling to make their way through something hard like a carrot, they never show the ultrasonic knife cutting a carrot. I suspect the ultrasonic feature helps more on softer things.
Jacques Pépin suggested at [0] "basically you need three knives":
- a chopping knive, 9-12" depending on one's hand
- a utility knife for slicing, about 6"
- a paring knife, a cheaper ordinary one is fine
Of those, other than the chopping/chef's knife, I imagine that one could generally slice cheese with the utility knife (depending on the cheese, of course).
Ironically, the cheeses I would cut with a chef's knife are exactly the ones that aren't going to stick to the knife. The ones that get messy are just as easy to cut with a butter knife.
(Amusingly, butter is one of the demos in this video.)
A Santoku or other knife with scalloped sides do well. There are also in fact, cheese knifes, for cutting and serving that are popular for self service cheese boards. Wire is also popular for cutting large block cheeses.
The problems were even bigger than that - they tested factory sharpness and factory geometry that often are shit. And not thinning and sharpening them properly. Let alone that the steel on the factory edge has high chance to fatigued/softer than the rest.
I believe the thinking is serrated knives work best for things where the skin is tough, but the internal structure is weak. So crusty bread with a lot of air inside.
Also, surprisingly, tomatoes. Lots of people suggest small serrated knives (if you have them) for tomatoes.
My question for this product is entirely different: It's well-known that ultrasonic sound can still damage your hearing despite being inaudible or nearly so. Does this?
I personally watched Scott spend years working on the project and obsessively iterating on the steel, the vibration pattern, the circuitry, the handle, and the form factor. Scott is a hacker, one of us for sure. I mean, the guy built a custom robot just to measure cutting efficiency...
The knife is amazing and exactly as shown in the video. Rand Fishkin has a nice short on LinkedIn trying out the knife too. I think he shows one his (sharp) kitchen knives slicing through a lemon, then the Ultrasonic. It's astounding.
Disclaimer: I am a (tiny) angel investor in Seattle Ultrasonics.
Does that video show him doing actual prep? I 100% believe he made a knife that can make a paper-thin slice of a lemon. But that's not what a chef's knife is for. As someone who thinks the world would be a better place if this product worked and was successful: for god's sake record someone processing an onion. That's what matters.
In Rand's video he does an "old" lime, mozzarella, and a shallot. It's just a quick vid he did in like five minutes but it shows some prep. Rand is a prolific amateur chef...
So, I just watched this, and he's not processing a shallot, he's just slowly talking thin slices off it. Also: even when my MAC is rolled over and needs a hone, it still does a lime just as well.
I'm not saying this knife doesn't work just that I'm noticing that none of the videos show it working.
Seriously, it is only a little bit of an exaggeration to say that the entire job of a chef's knife is to quickly process an onion. What's especially weird is that even an inert knife with its factory edge will show well in an onion dice video!
If thats the actual best demonstration thats not good at all. Like either he is the worst cook ever or the knife is actually difficult to go down straight with..
Im sorry but the video feels a bit disingenuous with the way he is cutting the lime. With the normal knive he just pushes straight down on the lime and with the vibroknife he actually does a slicing move. Same with the cheese. It doesnt feel like an honest comparison
Maybe, though I'll note that this matches how I use regular knives with cheese & similar things: with a dull unscalloped knife I have to carefully go straight down to avoid tearing. If my knife is sharp (or temporarily oiled) and the food doesn't stick, I'll slice. Because I can. The end result is different: thinner slices, less crushing. Also faster.
I saw the same thing immediately. The robot arm could be calibrated to use a real slicing motion as well. They're misrepresenting the actual performance of this product.
Even the best tend to struggle with consistency and can only go so thin due to all the friction. An ultrasonic mandoline that can overcome all that would probably fly off the shelves and better match the original industrial intent.
On one hand I would buy that instantly. On the other hand, it’s already missing small pieces thanks to my current mandolin. Not sure I want to make my scariest utensil scarier.
I feel like the demo video embodies a lot of startup advice I've seen on HN about product vs team.
This video makes me like Scott and Seattle Ultrasonics. I feel I can trust Scott's expertise. His backstory fits what I imagine I would do if I were obsessed with a project like this. This makes me compelled to learn more and to maybe become a customer? Why? Because I want to see Scott succeed and would feel proud to be a part of that. Even if this knife didn't end up performing to my expectations or if I didn't really need a knife like this, I want to see Scott make more things. He has a very well-proven record of delivering and I would bet he could do it again.
Funny, that! Whatever type of marketing this is, it works on me.
Yeah, I don't know anything about knives and this is definitely not for me, but I will say I think the pitch was a perfect 10/10. I thought I would watch for a few seconds and stayed for the whole thing. Great job.
Maybe I'm just a sci-fi nerd who loves innovation, but this is so cool!
Clearly, this product is not intended for the mass market, and may find purchase with people who have tennis elbow and who can afford it, etc. <insert other critiques about practicality and applicability here>. But still, when was the last time someone tried to re-invent something as basic as a knife?
I thought I recognised the name - Bourbon Moth is the guy who faked a video of oily rags self-igniting to make a video to advertise fireproof bins for woodworking.
Writer Jack London's mansion,The Wolf House, that he was building up in Sonoma county was destroyed by a fire that investigators later attributed to the spontaneous combustion of oil-soaked rags in the dining room...
Uh, really? I haven't been following him for a while, so I don't absolutely know if you're wrong, but I absolutely can see him joking about it and maybe even taking it too far.
Never heard of either of these Youtubers but I've seen tons of cans of stains and such with warnings about potential self-ignition if left on rags in the wrong conditions...
Why is it people here seem so unusually sceptical?
It's expensive (but not really, only compared to knives - a $500 GPU isn't expensive). It's probably mostly good in certain niches and using a $10 knife that's sharpened properly is probably 95% as good in almost every application, and using a $10 knife that is only reasonably well sharpened is probably 90% as good. Slicing stuff for hotpot or yakiniku or Korean BBQ is what I thought of when I saw the ad, while for a lot of things it's probably not worth it. But a lot of stuff is like that - good in a niche, OK elsewhere, and there's always a cheaper option that's more flexible and almost as good even in the niche.
I feel like hn is upset by the lack of marketing. This looks like a direct sales ad that you'd get on Facebook, rather than the hype research marketing that mostly targets the b2b types who mostly dwell here? The marketing isn't the kind of marketing they normally get targeted by, so they notice it's marketing?
I notice this on other forums. If marketing isn't slick and well targeted, people get upset and suspicious because it's marketing. But functionally, they're not upset because it's marketing (almost everything is), they're upset because it's not enough marketing, and functionally they want more marketing that targets them better.
I think it's because it seems like a Juicero to anyone who uses knives to make dinner regularly. We're fascinated by tech, and sure, I'd try this, but I bet anyone who has prepped with a knife for hours per week is probably pretty skeptical on the practicality here.
A sharpened piece of metal has been reliable for thousands of years and will continue to remain so. For new tech, I am also a fan of the ceramic knives out there for vegetables, as they hold a razors edge much longer than metal (albeit are far more brittle - I use them for veggies only, no meat).
One can buy a decent steel chef's knife, a ceramic one, lose them both, buy them again, buy a sharpening stone and a strop for the price of one of these. On one hand, the sci-fi emergence of the vibroblade or something in the kitchen would be cool. On the other, it could be a $500 vibrating slapchop[1].
> It's expensive (but not really, only compared to knives - a $500 GPU isn't expensive).
No, it's really expensive. $400 is nearly a week's pay for an hourly worker in much of the US. For many on this site it might be less than a day's labor but that's not the general case.
The lack of trust is probably because knives seem to be a favorite product of shysters. Selling expensive knives that promise the moon and wow the audience with cool knife tricks just reeks of fast talking late-night infomercial salesman trying to get over on grandma. The tech looks cool, but the presentation is off-putting.
You're not thinking like a marketing executive. The people who make $400 a week are not the target audience for this product. It's that simple. Not everything is made for Walmart shoppers.
"Sure, people claim the kitchen knife has been a solved problem
for hundreds of years, but what if there was a kitchen knife that had a battery inside and cost $500?"
And if this version of the knife doesn't connect to the cloud, the next one will.
Everything has pros and cons. You haven't said a single pro. You haven't added any real cons to what I said, and made up hypothetical ones.
It's a sales pitch so you're saying why you wouldn't buy it. I'm not ordering one either, 500 is a bit steep for me. If he just showed off the technology, I suspect people here would be more enthusiastic about it, even if you wouldn't bother to buy it yourself.
I'm not saying you're wrong (at the price point), but that the framing of whether we're going to buy it is a result of the marketing.
> if this version of the knife doesn't connect to the cloud, the next one will.
That's just ugly cynicism. And I'm willing to bet a good amount of money the "next one" from this company won't. But it doesn't matter because this one doesn't and we're talking about this one, not some hypothetical that may never arrive.
If the rechargeable vibrator-knife becomes a fixture of kitchens around the world, it will prove the accusation of 'cynicism'. Until then, whether it's cynicism or sobriety is a matter of opinion.
I wrote in another comment that I think this pitch is a 10/10, but I think I understand the skepticism.
There's something about this sort of product that feels inherently gimmicky. I can't quite explain why, maybe because it's too good to be true, maybe because it's a kitchen appliance, maybe it has something to do with the vibrations.
For instance, my girlfriend has this eye cream applicator(?) that vibrates... for some reason. Is it a gimmick? I don't really know, but there isn't a research paper in the world that would convince me it isn't.
Anyways, this video had me hooked, and I would 100% try this out if I could. But I would never buy it without trying first.
I think it’s a really cool product. I would happily own one. The problem I have with it is that $400 is a LOT for a chef knife. A great knife and an awesome sharpener can be easily had for $150, or $250 if you get a top of the line sharpener. That knife will last you a lifetime. How long will this knife last? What happens when the battery runs out of lifespan. What about when the motor dies? If this was closer to $250, I’d be much more likely to buy it.
> using a $10 knife that is only reasonably well sharpened is probably 90% as good
I think the value proposition is in the idea that you don't have to sharpen this knife as often as with a normal knife, and that the performance is consistent.
The non stickiness is also a huge value proposition, because that is an annoying and time consuming aspect of any cutting.
We are usually skeptical. And I don't know why a weird ad for a smart-knife has gotten to the top-page of HN.
We don't like "buzz" and "hype"... if it's truly a great technology we can buy one a year from now. Not trusting a commercial to be honest isn't undue skepticism.
Interesting question, short answer - almost certainly not any more or less than you are already, and to the degree it does, it almost certainly is making things better and not worse.
First - ~all food illness causing bacteria is denser than air. about 1000x denser. On its own, it won't float.
Second - almost all cutting motions are still going to throw it around. So you are already doing this when you cut or chop food. You are slicing cell walls, etc, releasing pathogens that exist inside. But it doesn't like aerosolize in the sense of floating around, because it's denser than air[1]. How far it goes depends on the cutting motion, etc.
Third - does ultrasonic make it better or worse - well, again, it doesn't overall float, so it's really a question of does it do anything to make go farther/less far, and does it do anything to destroy or the opposite?
44khz (used here) is a common ultrasonic frequency in cleaning[2] and leak detection.
In fact, it's also used to remove bacterial cells from surfaces at higher intensities (and detect them at lower intensities).
It's actually one of the major ways non-heat pasteurization is done.
While it's not 100% at removing individual bacterial cells, even at super high intensity, ultrasonic frequencies are both detrimental to cell growth, and as used here, will cause lots and lots of bacterial death because of everything from cavitation to pressure changes to instantaneous heat to you name it.
Does it fling pathogens any further? Maybe? I'm sure there are some situations in which it will. But they don't seem normal. Like if you are just slicing raw meat or chicken, it's hard to see how it could do that.
Overall, it probably helps more than it hurts. As far as i can tell, it's not even a close question.
[1] It is possible to get the bacteria to float in air anyway due to brownian motion and other mechanisms, but it still seems overblown - the percent of food borne illness caused by inhaling bacteria vs eating underprepared food it is so small they don't even bother to track it. This knife is not going to change that.
[2] If you google it, you will also discover it's emitted by fearful rats. I don't know if the knife also scares rats away.
I think the parent is specifically referencing the point towards the end of the video where he shows smoke-like vapor coming off the food. It's not clear from your response if you are aware of that, so just wanted to clarify.
To me, it seems like you wrote a lot but never actually answered the question of the person you are responding to. A reminder: the question was does the blade aerosolize fluids. Based on the video (as soon as 10 seconds in) it sure looks like the answer is yes, to a much greater degree than a normal knife.
First, you are not actually correct on the question.
Here, let me quote the question:
"Honest question, does it aerosolize pathogens that cause food-borne illness?"
That is literally not "does it aerosolize fluids", which is what you claim the question is.
My first sentence:
"Interesting question, short answer - almost certainly not any more or less than you are already, and to the degree it does, it almost certainly is making things better and not worse"
How is that not a literal answer?
Again, the question was about aerosolizing pathogens that cause foodborne illness, not just random fluids. So i explained why ultrasonic knives are not going to do that more than normal knife would, and assuming we only care about pathogens cause foodborne illness, will do so much less.
Sure, it can aerosolize lime juice. Lime juice is not a pathogen that causes food borne illness?
If your answer is atually meant to claim it aerosolizes pathogens much more than a normal knife, please cite data or studies or some other form of science. I can give you citations to literally every claim i made. I wrote most of the science reasons.
The video does not show anything related to pathogens.
Otherwise, i think it is you who is not answering the question asked, which was not about fluids?
A good quality well sharpened knife already works incredibly well, doesn't cost $500, doesn't need to be recharged, and isn't going to be e-waste in 5 years (when the battery fails).
It's a cool idea, and I hope it is commercially successful, but not for me.
This thing is $399, which is on the expensive side of prestige chef knives, but by no means the extravagant side of it. People who buy knives that cost more than $150 generally buy lots of knives, and this is priced for that market.
But it's not priced for the market of people who buy lots of knives. Because those who buy lots of knives aren't going to be interested in some mediocre knife with a vibration motor attached to it.
Those who are interested in knives would be able to get a more impressive knife for $399. And they are usually the type of people that enjoy sharpening a knife until it cuts better than this ultrasonic knife ever will.
This is a product which is targeted at people who don't really know a lot about knives and prep their meals with a dull blade.
Yeah I mean, the product is either going to work or it isn't going to work. But the only people who are going to be early adopters for this are knife nerds. Obviously, you'll get a knife that r/chefknives admires for cheaper than that!
I'm not hyping the product. I keep a knife set up to easily slice tomatoes, and if I don't want to clean it carefully afterwards I just use a good thin serrated bread knife. I'm still not really sure what this knife is "for". But I'm also not ruling out that it is "for" something interesting.
The knife itself is made out of AUS-10, which is a very mediocre steel. It's not bad per-se, but when you're spending $400 on a knife, you typically expect premium steels to be used. Additionally, most knives in that price range typically have some sort of flair to them to make them visually appealing: Damascus patterning, nice wooden handles, etc.
I know the handle itself is integral to the ultrasonic function, but it reminds me of a cheap kitchen thermometer.
For comparison, 'analog' knives are much nicer looking for sometimes far cheaper.
AUS-10 is basically 440C, and is an excellent steel for cutlery (and was once considered at the very high end of stainless steels). Very stainless, reasonably tough, and honorable slicing edge retention if heat treated to a relatively high hardness (60-61HRC would be on the mark). It will sharpen OK, but may have a bit of a gummy feel on the stones and not be as easy as carbon/low alloy steels.
Again, it’s not that it’s bad per-se, it’s that it is easily outclassed by numerous other more modern steels. It’s cheap compared to more exotic stuff, and feels almost insulting at the price you’re paying for the knife.
If the knife we’re discussing was sub $100 I’d have no issue with AUS-10/440C, but we’re talking about a $400 knife.
Presumably if you want something that resists chipping due to the high forces of the ultrasonic, so you'd pick something with quite high toughness and moderate edge retention. Maybe something like CPM-CruWear? If you prefer something with higher corrosion-resistant properties, MagnaCut?
Those are just two examples of premium steels that would be superior to AUS-10 in every way. Additionally, as I already mentioned, you'd expect a knife that is $400 to be beautiful too. It really feels like the design element was left out of this knife. I'm sure the handle has many practical elements, but there has to be something that could be done to make it look more visually appealing.
It’s $499 with the wireless charger. I see that the charger isn’t required. You can take the battery out of the knife and charge it by USB. I would correct my comment, but it is no longer possible for me to edit it.
It's a proprietary form factor, so you're gambling on replacements being available down the line. I don't think it'll be easy to rebuild the battery pack without compromising the casing.
Given the battery specs and the form factor of the products, they could have used a 14500 cell that retails for $5. That's not as much recurring revenue as charging $80 for something proprietary though.
The dead battery is still e-waste and recycling isn't a magically neutral activity that brings back one new product out of an old one with no loss or energy spent.
the next version will come with plasma micro jets ejection from the cutting edge - convenient for civilian use. I'm also wandering about an array of shaped micro-charges on the edge - should be able to cut through several millimeters of steel in one move, etc. so a soldier can cut though an opponent's ballistic vest or a into an lightly armored IFV.
You can have it sharp with shaped charges array sitting a bit deeper and sideways, and new edge breaking out as side effect of shaped charges exploding, rinse and repeat, about 5 times for a regularly sized sword.
Even more interesting alternative is to have some quick blade switching machinery to switch on-the-fly between the actual blade edge and the shaped charge array and to add some feeding machinery of shaped charges into the array (and to have some stretch-shaped charges instead of the rounded ones)
I actually thought that was a neat touch, since that's one of my most frequent interactions with an online video. But it needs to be overridden when the pointer is over the other controls. I couldn't scrub through the video on desktop without repeatedly muting/unmuting.
I think if this can keep a knife effectively sharper than the equivalent nice steel with less maintenance, then it’s going to find a market.
I’m a nerd, but Ive found that once I’ve mastered a hobby I eventually gravitate towards convenience, optimizing my time over absolute performance. I’ve built five PCs in my life, and now I only own a macbook. I spent loads of time optimizing my hifi setup, and now most of my apartment is sonos. And I have probably 1k worth of nice japanese knives + whetstones, that I would happily replace with a single knife that needs little to no upkeep.
I am like you, but my concern with this knife is lifespan. My Japanese knives will last a lifetime. This knife has no warranty that I could find, but how long do we expect it to live? If it’s 10 years or so, I could be happy with it.
While I think this is neat, I doubt the added complexity of the device, extra space required for storage of charger and the chore of charging it are worth the benefit of a slightly better, easier slice. Might be nice for people with certain disabilities though.
How much do you actually cook though? As a former professional chef I still do a lot of cooking and I’d love one of these and any storage trade off looks absolutely worth while.
Yeah, have to say the video is pretty good. I came in expecting the typical shopping channel pitch, but it did a very good job explaining the things the knife can and can't do. It really helps that it's presented by the inventor himself.
This is a QVC product with the name of a US tech city slapped on it.
Signed, a guy living nearby the home of QVC in a decidedly non-tech area of the US.
Ps. don’t buy future e-waste kitchen ware unless you have accessibility reasons. You can get a good-enough victoronix 8” chef knife for $65 (I paid $36 a long time ago) and a world class chef knife for less than $250.
This is nonsense and your cynicism is unwarranted. I personally know Scott. He's worked on food tech in Seattle for decades, and developed the product and fundraised for Seattle Ultrasonics locally.
Ultrasonic knives are historically large footprint devices used in commercial/industrial food prep. The innovation here is making ultrasonic hardware compact enough to fit in the knife handle.
Say more? I'd love to see a takedown of this, but this isn't one. QVC does not appear to sell this product, nor would its performance differ whether or not QVC did.
QVC might not be a well written takedown of it, but he’s right that you don’t need an electronic knife.
My first job was at a knife shop so I’ve seen everything from stamped steel fantasy nonsense to traditional style hand forged items. There’s a lot that goes into making a good knife and you don’t need to spend a lot to get one. Similarly you can spend a lot of money for marginal to no benefit.
In general a hard edge with a softer back is necessary for a strong knife that will cut well. This is a function of heat treatment. A knife that is tempered the same the whole blade is fine for smaller knives but it’s possible to break the tips or edges off larger knives. From there metallurgy affects the edge retention and how easy it is to sharpen. Plain 440C will make a fine enough knife if heat treated properly but can also make blades that can’t be made particularly sharp and can’t easily be sharpened. These knives will be very stainless so this is why poor quality and good quality knives will be made in 440C. The next tier of knives beyond singular steel forging will be a very hard edge steel wrapped around a softer core steel. The sky is the limit from there in terms of metallurgy. The highest end knives will use powdered steel where precisely composed steel bars are made using uniform grains of steel and other attractive metals and doping materials as part of the forging process.
Once it gets home a good edge has to be maintained.
People do all sorts of things to dull perfectly good cutlery (I cringe when I see people use glass or marble serving/cheese boards as a cutting board). A off hand toss of a knife into a sink can roll the edge.
The worst offense is when I see someone at a farmers market with the grinding wheel “sharpening” a knife by crudely removing the hardened steel edge of a knife. Good luck cutting much with the softer core steel or softer tempered back steel.
While having an Evangelion style ultrasonic knife is cool, it’s certainly not necessary and I expect it can be ruined in many of the same ways a $400 traditional knife can be.
At home I have Henkels for the holidays and some forged food service knife’s for general use. When visitors throw the food service knives into the sink I just take out the sharpening stones and don’t cry all that much.
Literally everything you've said is about regular knives. You haven't said a thing about ultrasonic knives. So I'm not sure what you're trying to argue?
Knives are already high tech and the GP’s point that you don’t need an ultrasonic knife is valid even if “QVC product” is inaccurate. They’re not just hunks of steel. Sharp knives can be dulled by abuse which something that vibrates will be vulnerable to as well.
This is akin to the already established very expensive powdered steel knives. Do you need this to have a sharp knife? Nope. Is anyone wrong for wanting it? No.
This product isn't about not having to sharpen your knife.
It's about a knife that is ~equivalently sharp to begin with, but slices with less force and less sticking, and can therefore slice things more exactly/easily than otherwise.
Of course you don't need it, but it's fundamentally different from existing knives, which you seem to not be acknowledging. When you say this is akin to "powdered steel knives", no it isn't. Powdered steel is about hardness. Nothing to do with ease of slicing or lack of sticking.
So you're talking about things that have nothing to do with this particular technology.
I’m not taking a negative view on this knife or technology. I believe you’re misunderstanding the intention of my color commentary? “Do not need” is not equivalent to “this is terrible.”
Powdered metallurgy, to parry your point, is not about hardness but about having the most precise composition of a metal. I.e you can have better wearing 440C, better machinable 440C, etc. most of this was intended for manufacturing high end industrial equipment. For kitchen knives it’s unnecessary even if it’s cool. It’s incrementally better but like this product it’s not necessary.
Similarly this isn’t “new technology” aside from the packaging of industrial technology into a chefs knife. You can get X-Acto knife sized versions of this already. Ceramic blades came from industrial alumina production. Cool, not necessary, but nothing wrong if it’s your jam.
The classic “QVC knife” is the Ginsu knife which has a lot of the same claims/qualities from a far. It’s an implementation of pattern welded steel and when you use a microscope you’ll see its thousands of serrated edges. Their ad shows the user cutting a can and then thinly slicing a tomato. Works fine until the edge gets rolled and since it’s cheaply processed steel (lacking the points of good construction I mentioned above), that’s usually what happens. I’d expect the company this whole discussion is about doing a lot better here since they’re not trying to sell a three knife set for $29.95 with free shipping.
My point about things being easily damaged with mishandling is that most people simply don’t handle knives well enough to see a benefit from high end knives, not that they aren’t nice/better/valid/different/etc. All of that can be true and the knife no longer cut because the edge is damaged. A Ferrari is a technologically complex car but not a very good car if the tires are all flat. If this thing doesn’t have an edge it isn’t going to cut well.
This is a point they make on their own site:
> Is the knife dishwasher safe?
> Updated 13 days ago
>
> No, but neither is any sharp knife. Dishwasher detergents contain micro-abrasives that dull and chip away at knife edges. If you enjoy using sharp knives, never put them in the dishwasher!
This is actually a more strict take than I have on edge retention, but I wouldn’t complain if my cutlery were treated this way.
Like I said a few posts up, I have knives that cost several hundred dollars. I keep the cheap ones out so I don’t cry when they get lobbed into a sink with the dirty dishes. When sharp they all cut very well. The expensive ones are better at edge retention and can be made a little sharper. After a friend helps clean or cuts some cheese on the cheese board the knife that was used is dull and not a great tool, be it the $30 food service knife or the $400 Henkels knife. You just can’t cheat physics.
This is a semantic argument. This product smacks of being a garbage kitchen gadget. Whether or not it's a QVC product, it certainly looks like cheap white-label alibaba junk. Just look at that handle. Did they just slap a knifeblade into an electric nosehair trimmer?
I'd try one out of professional/academic curiosity (I'm a chef), but am highly skeptical of this product. It looks like absolute trash.
All the people saying this knife does anything remarkable clearly have no experience in maintaining a decent knife blade. I've got knives that I've had for over 20 years that perform as well as this thing appears to (in the slick prepared advertisement).
Having said all that, you won't find an accurate takedown of a product that isn't on the market yet. Still, I can't help but wonder if the person behind this had dedicated that effort towards helping mitigate the water crisis, deforestation, or any number of other inarguably nobler pursuits.
They actually had an industrial design studio come up with the design. It isn’t white labeled “Alibaba junk” and to my eyes, it doesn’t resemble that either.
> I've got knives that I've had for over 20 years that perform as well as this thing appears to (in the slick prepared advertisement).
You have knives that can not have potatoes stick without scallops in the blade? Or that can atomize lemon drops? Or that can cut through bread easily without a serrated edge? What I’m seeing in the video is a lot more versatile. But I can see needing a smaller utility knife still.
I worked in some of the best kitchens on the planet and for every hipster with a blue paper #2 carbon steel hand made japanese chefs knife there was an old gray beard with a row of old busted victorinoxes hanging on the wall. Both of these cooks would filet a halibut beautifully.
> Or that can cut through bread easily without a serrated edge?
Yes. Absolutely. IME a quality sharpened chefs' knife is far better at cutting bread cleanly than a serrated knife, which by contrast will leave a rough edge and loads of crumbs.
If you try to cut through a croissant, the amount of pressure needed will often crush the croissant before slicing through (though it depends on the type of croissant).
Meanwhile, while you can use a chef's knife to cut through a crusty baguette, as it's strong enough not to collapse, you need to apply so much pressure that it's not as safe -- the blade can slip to either side over the hard irregular surface. A serrated knife requires vastly less pressure and is therefore much safer.
Yes a serrated knife can leave a rough edge and crumbs, but that's better than smooshing something entirely or cutting your hand because the knife slipped.
It depends on the bread. Many breads are basically impossible to cut properly with a straight edge knife. They end up disfigured worse than what you’re describing with serrated knives.
Have you ever tried a bread knife with so-called "micro-serrations" (really something like ~0.5mm tooth depth / pitch)?
The one I have seems to cut just as cleanly as a chef's knife once within a material, but has better ability to bite into material at the start of a cut, when a chef's knife would be slipping off. (Think: a freshly-baked loaf of high-sugar bread, where the outside is relatively stiff, but the inside is so soft that the outside tries to "squish away" from a non-serrated slice.)
I would never use it for dicing, but it's oddly goot at e.g. slicing watermelon.
Have you seen this knife do any of these things in action? Will it continue to do so? Nobody has, or will, until this gadget hits the market.
I remain skeptical in spite of your weird defensive reaction. I'm speaking about how a product appears to me as a professional. Not attcking you personally (unless it's your product... then I think you should do something good for society with your time)
The blade must be sharpen regardless, the apex won't stay sharp on its right own. The vibration does help but it doesn't do any actual cutting if you dull the blade.
i've had both, and the reality is that they're both just steel -- a good grind will make any shit steel knife cut like a 700 dollar Japanese blade for a few days.
(and yes the Japanese steel dulls too. No cheating physics.)
Its my understanding of knife sharpening that carbon steel is easier to sharpen then stainless and that softer steels are more difficult then high hrc steel due to burr removal.
I use a knock-off of the edgepro I got for $30 online, with a nice set of compatible whetstones that click into the assembly that were $20 online. I did what everyone else does and hotglued some magnets underneath the piece you hold the knife on.
I tried a compatible strop that clicks in but it's not worth it imo; just use a normal strop.
just want to point out that maintaining a knife is a whole hobby that requires a time investment of learning the skill and storage of additional tools and materials. i'm surprised at all the apparent knife enthusiast posts trashing this device. I take my victorinox (which is absolutely nothing special and surprises me that it costs $60+ dollars) to the farmers market for sharpening but sharpness isn't even the problem. Potatoes in particular stick to the blade like a strong magnet and it takes me 5x longer to prep. I enjoy cooking but not chopping endless veggies and i'm hoping this thing can carry some of that weight without looking like i'm using an oversized electric toothbrush.
> just want to point out that maintaining a knife is a whole hobby that requires a time investment of learning the skill and storage of additional tools and material.
You're right that's a hobby. But the hobby's definition of "proper maintenance" and what it "requires" is basically just people nerding out about things that don't matter the slightest in the real world.
To maintain a kitchen knife so that it cuts a tomato without squishing it, you don't need a book on knife science. Further, that nerdery is probably actively harmful, because instead of simple solutions, people are told they need an inspection microscope and a variety of jigs and other implements. So they buy an objectively bad electric sharpener and move on.
> just want to point out that maintaining a knife is a whole hobby that requires a time investment of learning the skill and storage of additional tools and materials.
Properly maintaining a knife does. Most people don't need to properly maintain a knife. You can do it good enough with a honing steel and some crappy automatic sharpener.
I enjoy cooking good food for my family and myself, but cooking is not a hobby of mine. So if my knife can slice a tomato without crushing it, then that's good enough for me. I don't need to shave a tomato so thin that the slice is transparent.
Does the crappy automatic sharpener work? Well the knife cuts better after I use it, so yes, it does.
Yes as I mentioned I use often-recommended knives (victorinox, shun) and have them occasionally sharpened professionally and at least in my case the ultrasonic knife appears to solve some very real problems that knife maintenance cannot.
it takes no skill to make a blunt knife sharper. To make a sharp knife sharper, sure, but in a good vast majority of home knife situations, just doing anything with any flat sharpening surface is an improvement.
I can attest to this as I have improved knifes day one of trying despite my lack of any sort of skill
Sharpening a knife to r/sharpening standards is hard. But just honing frequently and occasionally using a cheap sharpener will get you further than 95% of home chefs.
my new favorite kitchen gadget is small deli slicer, $75 on amazon.
minor pain to clean, but MUCH faster than a knife, totally safe (pusher keeps fingers away from the blade) and you get precise thickness cuts every time, which means they cook precisely too.
Especially good for vegetables like potatoes, onion, eggplant, etc.
No? The point was to understand what the tool does and when it can help. And he found out that if you have a Burr it can help. But if you have a properly sharpened knife without a Burr it won't do anything to help and will just destroy your edge.
I used to sharpen my straight-knife planer blades, planing irons, chisels, and knives with whetstones / water stones. It was too big of a pain in the ass over time, so I switched to diamond stones.
Biggest advantages is that you don't need to pre-soak them and diamond stones don't develop a valley / have to be flattened.
if you plan on getting into sharpening I would just start with a coarse, fine, and extra fine diamond stone and a leather strop w/ stropping compound.
Whetstones were hard 20 years ago. Right now there is abundance of quality info and products. The community actually figured out idiotproof and effective ways to deburr, to strop, resin bound diamond stones are affordable (or even cheap if you just buy the abrasive from China and go the diy route).
In my case I just wait for the sharpening knife guy who pass once a week in my neighborhood. It is quite easy as I am working from home and he plays those distinctive panpipes notes.
When it does come time to sharpen, I constantly see places offering knife sharpening services, and they’re usually cheap enough. Or you could get a gizmo that does a mediocre job (and shaves away far too much material) if you just want to get it done. Or you could learn to do it yourself which isn’t that hard or time-consuming but is somewhat of a labor of love.
This is the first time I've heard someone say honing is very important, when I was first learning this, I was told that it was the next thing to pseudoscience!
Absolutely not. A blade can stay sharp for a much longer period of time than it can stay honed. The edge of a piece of paper is extremely sharp, but it only cuts you in specific circumstances due to being difficult to maintain a firm edge.
A knife's edge is closer to that than you'd think. At the scales of sharpness of a good knife, it's impossible to keep the edge straight for very long. A honing rod quickly brings these back in line. I hone knives after maybe a week of use; it only takes a few seconds.
And this is a comically easy property to test. Use a "dull" knife then hone it and try again. It will cut drastically better.
umm, you raise a valid concern, afaict, however, e-waste is kind of a taboo word around here, or? Or maybe just another part of the 'inevitable' belief system.
Like, how about that _planned obsolescence_ of a vast majority of consumer electronics hardware?
(If that ain't the case, would be happen to learn otherwise from someone with better knowledge.)
I guess with knives the thing is it’s very easy and cheap to get a version that works well lasts pretty much forever. Makes the other options look worse in comparison.
Otoh: this is NOT how a person cuts with a knife! Kills credibility of the whole complicated measurement with the robot. Just ask a chef to cut on a scale. You will be surprised. People can cut with semi-dull knife by pulling the knife towards their body not pushing down towards the cutting surface.
Any new tech arrives as a gimmick, too expensive and underwhelming to be practical in daily life. Think about early TVs with a postcard-size monochrome screen, early 8-bit hobby computers, first Tesla cars, solar panels at the time when only spacecraft carried them, etc.
If the thing proves somehow useful, mass adoption and mass production slashes the cost 2-3 orders of magnitude, and the thing becomes mundane.
Otherwise it becomes forgotten as a weird gimmick.
Ultrasonic knives have been available for non-food uses for a long time. They are useful in certain narrow applications, such as cutting leather or some plastics.
That said, they come with two big caveats. First, if you push them into any harder material, the edge is destroyed almost immediately because of the micro-scale "jackhammer" action. So, hit that avocado pit and the knife is probably cooked.
Second, the constant motion heats up the blade, to the point of melting thermoplastics or causing the edge to lose temper if you're pushing a bit too hard, cutting the wrong material, etc.
It's your money, but I suspect this knife is more of a hassle, and requires more care, than a regular kitchen knife. And let's face it, the coolness factor aside, how often do you struggle to cut chicken, tomatoes, or bread? If you do, it's probably because your knife is dull, and this knife will get dull too.
I'm an amateur cook, my immediate question was how much the vibration and heating will affect vegetable and meat oxidation and cell damage on the cut surface.
Could this improve the texture and flavor of certain foods? Like make garlic taste even more garlicky? Or could it cause an apple slice to brown faster? Can it be used to slice cooked fish as if it were sashimi? Etc.
If a site like SeriousEats does a product review I hope they focus on qualitative taste, and possibilities for enhancing cooking techniques, not merely saving time/effort to do something.
all the comparisons in the vid show knives being pushed through the food. that's not a good way to use a knife.
if you used a knife to actually slice the tomato instead of chopping it, you'd get a much different force result.
not to say there's no benefit here, but def feels intentionally exaggerated.
also, i wonder how fast this blade will wear if you ever accidentally pressed the edge into the cutting block. my guess is that it will wear much faster.
It depends completely on the knife. A nakiri or a bunka wants you to push cut, for instance.
I definitely did notice that the video didn't show any bulk prep work: a clean cut through a single product is not nearly as interesting to me as how cleanly and quickly I can work through a couple onions.
That’s not necessary with an ultrasonic knife and would generally be a waste of time. The vibrations take the place of needing to slice, rather than chop. This knife is not meant to be used like a normal chef’s knife.
I’d still never get one because I love my knives (and zen out hard when sharpening for an hour or two), but the push is literally the goal here.
Having worked a fair amount with ultrasound for eye surgery [0] the physics similarities are very striking (the FEA simulation gave me flashbacks) but it's almost funny how the same principles can be translated and applied for an entirely different end purpose (cataract surgery, and slicing tomatoes!)
To use Scott's words it is very cool to see such a tech translation from industry to home use. I would still be cautious about the lifetime of these devices (namely how it will deal with water ingress over time) but the fact that they will come out of a factory is already quite a HW startup feat.
If it helps, the inventor worked at other kitchen product companies like Sansaire (founder) and Anova. And at other places in the cooking world. So they’re not entirely unknown either.
Slice thinner and cleaner with less effort. For example the bread slicing ability — I’d love to be able to cut really thin slices of brioche to drape over things or toast. It would also be fun to play with what it might let you do that a regular knife just can’t. I don’t see this as an alternative to a regular knife, but as a different tool that would elevate garnishing.
I’m a decent home cook with decent knife skills and i take my knives to a sharpener from time to time, I have tech job salary, I preordered. Seems neat.
I don't think the parent was bragging about the salary thing - a lot of the other comments here are mentioning the price (which to be fair, is definitely in the expensive gadgets/toys bucket...) so he/she (s/g) is saying - he's just a home cook, he's got semi-decent knife skills, and he's in a position that he can afford this.
And let's be honest, tech geeks are basically the target demographic for this sort of thing - as are half the gadgets on Kickstarter. Yes - we can talk all we want about carbon credits, and eWaste, and doing things the old fashioned homestead way when men were men, took cholera and dysentry on the chin, and knew how to use a whetstone, or to whistle (I can do one of those things...)...
I am sorely tempted, and I'm an amateur cook at best...if even that. And truthfully, this probably won't make my food better than a $15 IKEA knife (assuming I just replace those regularly). But it may make the process more enjoyable. And the tech is cool...
I’m sincerely congratulating parent for their purchase. Geez one can’t genuinely just be happy for someone else without a third party hallucinating way too much out of a two-word sentence.
I work with some bigger ultrasonic cutters/welders and the thing I didn't see in the video was the horrible noise they make. He says the knife makes no noise but they also don't have the noise on for the shots of the bigger ones so I'm suspicious.
It is a cool product, but I have the clumsiness of the average home cook. So my old style knifes are plenty sharp for me. I would not be comfortable using this. But if there were a version with the slipperiness he shows, just having standard sharpness, it would be much more interesting to me.
BTW I think the focus on knife sharpness is overrated for most kitchen tasks. At least for home cooks. Your knives should just have the necessary sharpness. More than that is a negative in my opinion.
I mostly agree that, as someone who cooks something intricate <10 times per year, a sharp knife is in fact more dangerous than a dull one.
Scott in the video makes the argument that sharp knives are safer, because you don't have to use as much force. But the only time I've ever cut myself with a knife in the kitchen have been with very sharp knives, eg one time handling it while washing the blade.
So, some tech business took something that is practical, robust, and low maintenance, and then added a deteriorating battery, delicate electronics, and the need to constantly charge a f-ing kitchen knife. Bullshit innovation is reinventing things, but worse. I wouldn't be surprised if they at some point added AI powered cutting modes and a subscription service, because the target audience clearly is gullible morons that are easily fooled by fancy ideas of vaguely sci-fi concepts.
This is super cool tech and I truly appreciate the grind this guy went through to bring a hardware product to life.
At the same time, I've been using a $5 chef knife for almost a decade and just giving it a few passes against a honing steel every few weeks. It gets plenty sharp after that, to the point where I don't feel I'm missing anything. Then again, I'm just a home cook who's super into kitchen knives so I acknowledge I'm not in the target market.
Cool tool, however: the people who are going to spend $500 on a cook's knife likely already have the capability and motivation to properly sharpen a kitchen knife. The market for this feels extremely limited.
Also: I'd be curious how this feels in the hand due to the button and the extra weight.
To me the main appeal of this is not that it makes cutting easier (you already reduce much of the cutting force needed if you slice across instead of pushing down, which this seems to be doing at a micrometer level) but the fact that food doesn't stick to the blade.
All of my knives have sticking issues, potato slices are the worst culprits. When doing a lot of prep work on veggies in a cramped area it's a pain and this seems like it could actually fix things?
OTOH, I'm not a huge fan of the design, I don't mind spending good money on a knife but between the blade profile and the chonky handle, it looks like an hybrid between an 8" fibrox and an electric turkey cutter.
If there was a premium release with a fancier handle (could wood work?) and a nicer blade profile (something like a gyuto or a french sabatier) I would be interested and I think it would reduce sticker shock (looks premium, expect premium price). I love the design of the charging tile though!
I watched the video and this seems pretty neat. Don't want to knock it or be negative. He's definitely right that most people's knives are dull – when I use knives in other people's homes I often just want to cry at how dull they are (also: pans – how the hell do so many people have dented damaged pans?) But you really don't need to splurge out €329 to have reasonably sharp knives.
All you need is a sharpening steel and use it once or twice after every usage. Even a cheap knife will last for years while remaining reasonable sharp. Mine was €6 or thereabouts at Tesco two years ago and is more than sharp enough.
Of course more expensive knifes (ultrasonic or not) are better and can hold an edge longer. You can spend more time, effort, and money on making them sharper than just a quick use of a cheap sharpening steel. If you want to spend the extra money: go for it! But for a normal home cook: you can go a long way with consistent use of a €10 sharpening steel.
I think it’s really cool, but not sure about the button design (seams to trap germs) and placement (index finger is not where I naturally exert pressure when cutting with a kitchen knife).
Also would be nice if it can be fitted to existing blades as handle retrofit, but I understand that might not be possible to properly tune the vibrations.
It's not obvious at first in the video, but they pre-cut a flat base into the plum to stabilize it on the table, and are cutting in at a slightdownward angle. I feel like you could make nearly the same shot with a regular knife. Tricks like this (and the deliberate filming angles to obscure those details) make the video seem disingenuous and come across akin to a snakeoil sales pitch, which detracts from my genuine interest in how the ultrasonic tech fares.
The shot of the scale showing force as they cut through a tomato was more compelling. I notice after the initial breach, when the knife is about halfway through, the forces are equal again. I assume that's due (at least in part) to friction between the inside of the tomato and the wide, side of the blade. Do they make a skinnier vibro-blade, or something like an ultrasonic cheese cutting wire?
I've invested close to a thousand dollars in sharpening tools over the years. I keep my knives super sharp as a hobby more than anything. I'd still love to have one of these in the drawer for certain tasks. It's ugly and clunky but I'd probably still use it on a semi-regular basis for warm breads, cheeses, etc. I bet the action would help with sharpening as well.
I do wonder if a tuning fork or 'mass on a stick' hidden in the tang could provide enough vibration to help with the sticking. You'd probably have to smack it with every cut but it's so rarely a problem that would be fine.
Oh wow - would love to know what you got for sharpening, or what you'd suggest for the home cook?
When you say ugly/clunky - I'm guessing you mean it's a bit heavier, or the weight will be off compared to a good high-end chef's knife? (I don't have anything like that, haha).
I did note on their FAQ they say to never activate the blade whilst sharpening:
> Do not activate the ultrasonics during sharpening - this can damage both the blade and your sharpening stones, as the ultrasonic movement is too aggressive and not evenly distributed across the entire cutting edge. Also, reshaping the blade to a different belly curvature or tip shape can cause it to fall out of tune, so avoid removing more material than you would during normal sharpening.
It's a bit clunky but I tend to obsess over the angle of the grind, and something that physically constrains that is going to allow me to enjoy the process. For general purpose sharpening you don't need much more than a coarse stone (320 grit) and a honing steel. The coarse stone will bring the edge back (learn how to feel for the burr) and regular use of the steel will keep it in good cutting shape until it wears down. You might not get hair-popping razor sharpness, but that's a fairly short-lived state with kitchen knives unless you do a lot of maintenance.
Probably not great, otherwise they would have shown it, but being able to cut frozen food properly would be a game changer. The only things I found working are saws, and they are messy.
I learned long time ago, if you are freezing it, freeze it in a shape that can be used frozen.
For instance, I flatten ground meat into 1lb "patties" and don't freeze it as a roll. I can literally snap the patty in half if I want half a pound, and the increase in surface area means rapid thawing if I place it, still in its storage bad (ziplock usually, but vacuum seal sometimes), into room temp water.
After culinary I was a cook/chef in starred/bib kitchens for 15+ years. I also apprenticed at an old school Japanese whetstone sharpening shop during that time period (my SF neighbors here probably know BC). I have a certain amount of expertise in this area and I can say unequivocally that there is no way this could be used for even moderate prep work.
There's nothing wrong with the steel, it's a pretty standard SS, the size is a little too large for my hands, I like a 160, but 200 is a good middling size for most. It’s the vibrating. You know how your hands feel after holding a ~~vibrato~~…lawn mower for a while and then your hands feel like fuzzy pudding? There’s that, but the blade will shift constantly, and heaven help you if the motor goes wacky/dying.
I'm trying to think of a place for this in any kitchen, home or professional, and cannot see it being safe or all that useful...especially for $400.
It's a cool idea and really makes wanna go watch The Bad Batch again, BX Battle Droids carry vibroblades, but other than pure novelty it aint cuttin it for me.
Bonus for the buy-curious:
Getchu a hydrodynamic spatula…jk. Get a nice 160mm - 200mm carbon steel gyuto, Tojiro makes pretty good entry level knives; a paring knife, and a Mercer white handle offset bread knife (a classic) and that’s all you need. For sharpening, a medium grit, muddy synthetic whetstone, I’m a huge fan of Aoto 2-4k, and you don’t really need much else for getting started, but in a way that even the serious pros will know you’re doing the right things. Maybe you need a strop, maybe. Chromium Oxide on leather or cork. Oh, and a SOFT wood cutting board. Hinoki wood is the undisputed king of cutting boards, or you could go with a no-trax self healing synth rubber if you have the $$. Put a wet kitchen towel/papertowel under your cutting boards so they don’t move around when you’re using them. Haste makes waste, and a wet towel is a hot towel.
The concept of the knife is interesting. I could see myself buying one if I had that much money lying around.
Maybe if the home chef who needs a leg up sees this it would prevent them from spending that much or more on more expensive knives and maintenance products. For those of us who know our way around the kitchen I’m not sure how much benefit I would get out of it.
Also did anyone think some of the cutting segments, particularly the radish, seemed sped up? The movement of the blade and hand looked a bit unnatural.
A different but far better piece of cutting edge technology is a modern, diamond-encrusted nickel/chrome-plated steel plate.
These things are now so sharp they can bring an edge profile back to a knife in five strokes without even needing lubrication (which is nice as water is a PITA when it causes corrosion between the steel bed and the plating.)
Every knife in your kitchen can be razor sharp in seconds and kept razor sharp whenever you need them to be. IMHO, far more useful than a single digi-vibro-knife.
Example product: Trend 300/1000 diamond sharpening kit.
Agreed. Even a knife with heavy usage only needs a few swipes to realign the edge. Warning though, sharpening things can be addicting. I have a massive straight razor and finishing stone collection. It's a wonderful hobby, but dipping into natural stones gets very expensive
I love these inventor stories, as the Chef's Knife does towards the end of the video. Another great one is Springfree trampolines, from NPRs How I Built This:
He specifically says it's not a lightsaber, and when he's cutting the tomato you can see he does have to apply force for it to go through. He compares it to an ebike, where it makes cutting easier but it's not magic.
If you’re used to sharp knives then it’s probably safer than applying more pressure which could yield in surprising ways. Getting used to it is the dangerous part, especially if not forewarned or the user doesn’t heed the warning.
Lightsaber would be different because doesn’t have a blade to guide.
Not really. The dangerous aspect of a knife is when it moves unexpectedly. The sharper it is, the harder it is to create a scenario where it jumps on something particularly dense, like when a saw hits a knot in a tree.
If you’re pushing down with hard force, it basically doesn’t matter if the knife is sharp anymore, it’ll just chop your finger off. However, with an extremely fine cut, it will be much easier to reattach, as the edges will match up well. With a dull knife, you’re not slicing, you’re more tearing your way through something.
You say this from any special
knowledge or is it just your opinion from the video? Looks to me like it will go through your flesh and bone like they're not there, in a way even a razor sharp knife won't.
Also, while it's true that dull knives are in some ways more dangerous than properly maintained ones, that doesn't mean safety increases monotonically with sharpness. I sharpen my kitchen knives every weekend and I'm perfectly capable of achieving an edge I could comfortably shave with, but I deliberately don't (I skip the highest-grit step and leather stropping needed for that) because it's not optimal for the vast majority of cooking tasks. The only thing that happens regularly in my kitchen that needs razor sharpness is scoring the top
of a sourdough loaf, and my wife uses actual razor blades for that.
This strikes me as more of a competitor to electric carving knives than something I'd want to replace a standard chef's knife with. It looks like it needs to be used with very great care.
I find it funny most of these comments are about how unnecessary this thing is.
To me it has immediate appeal to make cutting easier. It's also really not that expensive. I suppose this is the same site that is crazy about AI and thought Dropbox would flop. This thing has more utility than AI to me. I suppose being a software person can warp your perception of the real world.
Why can't you just buy a cheap whetstone and sharpen your knives when they're dull? I have a mid chef's knife from wustoff or zwillig, don't remember which, that I just keep sharp periodically when I notice it's dull. I've had it for years of home cooking.
Impressive dedication -- and what a refined looking product. Of course the real world use needs to match the advertising. I am not in the target segment (too expensive for me) but love to see such products and innovations across daily life tools -- hopefully this inspires others too.
The bit that looks actually interesting to me is buried in the middle of the video - while the ultrasonic switch is on, food visibly falls off the knife instead of sticking to the sides.
This product is a huge gimmick. Buy a $20 double sided sharpening stone on amazon and you can keep even the cheapest stainless steel knives sharp and chef ready for years. Just basic knife sharpening skills are needed which you can pick up in 10 minutes on YouTube.
Theres a whole class of people who will pay more to not have to maintain things themselves. I bought an EV because they require little maintenance and I also hate filling up.
I have decent knives but have probably never sharpened them properly. If there are more reviews, I'd pick this up.
I was just curious about two things - seems there might be some knife aficionados or experts here!
1. Sharpening - As a home cook, who doesn't know a lot about knives/sharpening - how hard would this be to maintain? Would it be plausible to get some basic home sharpening gear, and maintain this myself? Or should I take it to a professional knife sharpener - and if so, how do I even know if they're a good one, and won't damage the blade, or perhaps are good, but somehow get the blade out of "tune" etc?
2. Safety wise - is there anything at all to be concerned about with ultrasonic 40Khz blades? Should I be wearing any hearing protection when using this? (Context - I have hearing loss in both ears, and wear hearing aids - keen to preserve my remaining hearing, and am understandably cautious about this kind of thing for my family and me).
awful handle ergonomics compared to any "real" knife e.g Wustoff or Victorinox.
No tang whatsoever, so the knife has no strength. It's probably unbalanced, which makes it awkward to use with finesse and speed. A year of heavy use and the "haft" will degrade to the point that it's dangerous.
Buy a proper carbon steel knife. You can keep it sharp forever with 5 minutes on youtube and $20 worth of kit from Amazon. Plus, it will never go flat.
I would get this for the same reason I'm planning to replace my couch with an optimal-for-moving-through-a-turn couch as soon as I find a carpenter willing to make it. The middle part will be evened-out by a separate, round cushion.
If you're an amateur and really want to spend this much money, get a good enough knife (e.g. the classic victorinox) and a chef's choice electric sharpener, and you won't have any more issues.
I've read multiple reviews saying the chefs choice sharpeners are basically useless. Having owned 2 of them I can confirm they seem to do almost nothing after the first few times using them.
A few YT knife channels have done deep dives showing why they stop working soon after purchase, the details escape me but I have to agree with the end result....
Such funny (and odd) takes on knives. They are tools, nothing more. I sharpen ours weekly, using a sharpener that wears down the blades. When they get too worn, they get replaced.
If you have a sharp knife and a wet cloth under your cutting board chopping is a joy, otherwise it's a dangerous, tedious, and exhausting task that turns so many people away from cooking entirely
The wet cloth between the counter and the cutting block keeps the cutting block from sliding / moving on you when force is applied, which is more comfortable and safer.
I cook every day, and I’m also a mechanical engineer, I’ve never understood where the sideways force comes from. I’ve also never had a board slide away from me. Tbh I thought this came from chefs chopping on stainless steel worktop. I’d like to understand.
Even if you're chopping perfectly vertically, a board will slide around or rock slightly. Like say you want to julienne some basil or something with a chef's knife, you'd probably be doing a rock chop, which involves lateral forces, causing the board to slide. Then also if you want to scoop up the food with the side of your knife, like scrape up minced garlic, those are lateral forces too. A wet cloth under a cutting board also softens/dampens the force of the knife hitting the board when chopping, which is nicer on your wrists.
When you chop, you're applying force almost entirely vertically. When you slice, you're applying at least some force horizontally. That horizontal force can be transmitted through the knife to the food to the cutting board, causing the board to slide. It's especially noticeable when you're slicing food that is high, like a loaf of bread, and the cutting board is on a slick stone countertop.
i guess that is why you need to keep pressing the button (also battery conserving too)
the guy mentions cutting self occurs mostly due to excessive force applied by the (amateur/inexperienced) user and i kind of agree.
other part is that the inattentiveness and distraction, maybe trying to be fast... although if i were able to cut through (pun intended) things that easily, i would be steadier hand...
As an aside, this feels very familiar as a sci-fi weapon, does that ring a bell for anyone? I was thinking William Gibson first but I can't place it there.
This could be the exemplar prototype for Dune knives that can penetrate a Holtzman Shield. Also recall in Dune there is an aversion to technology, so the simplicity and required human operation is a perfect fit.
For $500+ you can get a really, REALLY nice Damascus steel chef's knife with a beautiful patina and wood handle. Yes: it requires a bit more maintainable but nice things often require some work. When it's properly honed & sharpened, it'll cut just as well as this.
So you're basically saying that you can spend as much money to get a knife that will cut as well but requires regular work put into it, whereas this doesn't? I think that's the whole pitch here...
I think a lot of the commentary here is missing the main point — while you may not (I mean, certainly do not) need an ultrasonic chef's knife, it's a cool origin story, and the guy has the receipts! Years of iterations of circuit board design, blade shapes, and the robotic cut-test arm... I personally would enjoy using this in my kitchen just for the hacker vibes.
Although not a pro, or even a good cook, I do like quality knives — but, like most people who develop a casual nice-knife affinity, I then bought a few quality knives, a couple of junk knives to try restoring with a whetstone, a hand-made Japanese knife with my name on it, and... then I had enough kitchen knives to last the rest of my life, and there was no reason to buy any more.
This is the first one I have considered in years. Not because I need it, or because it's necessarily better at cutting must things than the workhorse Sekimagoroku nakiri I use[1] but because it's fucking neat and radiates nerdium waves.
This knife should be celebrated for what it is: basically an epic nerd project. That can also cut at least a few kinds of fruit more easily (or at least more enjoyably).
[1]: KAI model AE5206 (which seems very much like a Shun knife, made by the same company, but cost me only $53)
So the issue with that tomato cutting test was that it was terrible form.
You obviously don't apply flat pressure on a tomato until it breaks, you slice it by sliding the blade forward as you push down. It's unclear to me that this blade offers any improvement over proper technique, and feels disingenuous to even offer that comparison.
The tomato test is disingenuous - no one slices a tomato by pressing the knife straight down - you slice it to break the thick skin and follow with a slicing motion. The rest of the graph basically shows no difference between the force used for ultrasonic one and standard knife used inefficiently?
And yet, when people like to show off how sharp their knife is, dropping a tomato on it (blade-up obviously) and watching the tomato split in two is one of the favorite tests.
Probably (and precisely) because you can only achieve this with a knife that cuts very well.
What does this device accomplish in the kitchen, besides being able to make fine slices of vegetables more easily? Electric carver knives beat it for slicing meat.
And then for most any other situation of knife usage it isn't necessary at all, as knives are mostly used for chopping. The one (1) thing I can see this being useful for is a shrunken down version for paring, but whether or not that is mechanically feasible, I don't know. The curve and the handle are more important than this vibro-verbing.
Nice dialogue, btw. "Help chefs feel great about themselves in the kitchen", "access to sous vide". <Kitchen Woke> ?
The website is just https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/cXjbSVt9XNM video embedded + a button to buy. (But it still tracks the referrer in the URL so it tells google that you went HN frontpage -> Ultrasonic Chef's Knife. It seems HN has put back referrer in the links :|)
TL;DR it's really freaking cool, though the blades do seem to get dull fairly quickly. That said, they are made of a radically different grade of steel.
If the tech in the NeoBlade has been adapted successfully to the chef's knife, then all of the haters are going to sound like all of the early "you don't need an air fryer" pundits who totally missed the point and were clearly wrong.
Also, all of the "why would I care if I can aerosolize citrus" commenters have clearly never worked in a cocktail bar. Which isn't a knock; this is Hacker News, after all. Just know that there are people who make fancy drinks who would pay a lot to be able to do this easily. If you are the sort of person who spends time thinking about clear ice, you don't need this explained to you.
I'm still in the camp that air fryers are stupid. A convection oven does literally the same thing.
Also, portable air fryers make such small servings that they're useless for people with families. What the hell I going to do with three chicken wings?
You're technically right that an air fryer is a type of small convection oven, but dismissing them as "stupid" ignores why they're so popular. The point isn't that they reinvent physics, it's that they package convection in a way that's faster, uses way less electricity, is easier to clean, and perfectly sized for 1-2 people. Most folks aren't cooking for a big family every meal. I often just want to make fries, roast veggies, or crisp up leftovers. My Cosori lets me do that without heating the entire kitchen (and way faster, too).
I also simply don't have a convention oven. I rent my place, and it's not like I can just swap out the white goods.
Yes, the smallest ones are limited in capacity, but that's not the whole category. Larger models handle whole chickens.
The proof is in the market: people buy them in droves because they make food hot/crispy really quickly. A conventional oven can do the same thing, but it's like saying a desktop computer makes laptops "stupid". Technically true, but it ignores convenience, size, and efficiency, which are the reasons air fryers took off.
Anecdotally, most air fryers are owned by people who used to believe that they didn't need an air fryer. Have you actually had one in your life?
I respect that. We're both operating with radically different goals and end results. If you're cooking primarily from a food culture that evolved without ovens then it's clear you don't need an air fryer OR a convection oven.
I would however suggest that this makes you poorly qualified to deem an entirely category of popular tools "stupid" just because you don't happen to use them.
> I'm still in the camp that air fryers are stupid. A convection oven does literally the same thing.
Air fryers are convection ovens, just with higher capacity fans relative to their own size compared to typical convection ovens (large convection ovens are sometimes coming with "air fryer" modes that replicate this, now.)
OTOH, aside from the utiltiy of having an additional smaller oven—which is not negligible, for many people’s cooking patterns—plenty of existing ranges include conventional rather than convection ovens, and adding an air fryer is a lot cheaper than replacing the range.
> Also, portable air fryers make such small servings that they're useless for people with families.
I have a family, and a countertop (I assume that’s what you mean by “portable”) air fryer/toaster oven, and I don't find that to be the case. We get a lot of use out of it.
In particular, you don't need expensive stones, guides or lapping systems to do it. An aliexpress-grade 3000/8000 waterstone, a flattening stone and a strop will get most knives shaving the hairs off your arm for under £20 all-in.
The odds I will ever learn to use a waterstone or strop are nil. A Chef’s Choice manual sharpener is really easy and makes my knives plenty sharp enough to cut tomatoes.
Yeah they work fine too. The point is not that you need stones to sharpen knives at all, but you don't need insanely expensive glass or diamond stones like the YouTubers tend to tell you to get to shaving-sharp if you want to.
Just don't use a sharpener with the carbide v-blades that shave off slivers of metal or you'll get a knife with a concave edge that doesn't meet the board along the whole length and that really is a pain to fix (related note on that, a kitchen knife edge up in a vice is quite a disconcerting thing!).
I'd very strongly recommend vs the waterstone. Use a ceramic or diamond one. The strop is not required but it's nice.
Sharpening knives is quite the therapeutic process, at least it was for me when I learned to do them. Now I can sharpen knives at the bottom of a tea cup or even a brick.
To answer the question, there is an infinite number of things I can do with my time. Learning that particular manual skill, especially when there is a very simple alternative, just doesn’t seem worthwhile to me.
Never heard it would be too fine for some steel. 300 is for creating a new edge or fixing chips or otherwise broken edge, 1000 and 3000-4000 is enough for maintaining a chefs knife. And if you can't get a knife sharp on 1000 you need to fix your technique.
I use the 300 only if the knives are too dull or I want to change the apex to 20 degrees. Honing them back is just the 1200 and a strop. Like mentioned I can shave with that. 3000 is overkill imo, unless you are looking for the mirror finish.
I agree. My experience: I bought some basic sharpening stones and watched some youtube and have had pretty good results with my basic japenese chef knives (~$100-150) that I've had for 15 years. It's 5 minutes of work every month or two for me. This product doesn't make sense to me for the price point. The aesthetics look really poor.
Maybe it’s dumb. But the video seems convincing. Ultrasonic knives are also used in some industrial and medical settings. So the concept does work. And the inventor of this one worked at Sansaire, Anova, and other kitchen hardware places. So they have a lot of credibility producing real products.
Hehe, yeah I was wondering if something like SawStop could work. It would just need to switch off the ultrasonic, not spectacularly destroy the blade. However, I then remembered the frankfurter demo for SawStop and realised there are extra challenges for something that is actually intended for cutting meat.
I'm a bit surprised to see how much snark there is in the comment sections of this video. The requests for "let's see an independent chef use this knife to do real kitchen work" make total sense, but the moralizing around e-waste and losing fingers etc feels off balance.
People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives, of course there's a viable market for sharper kitchen knives. And for e-waste, you are never going to make meaningful progress by telling consumers to feel bad for buying fun things. The problem is so much bigger than that, the energy is better spent in a different place.
This is a cool and novel tool, at least as far as its genuine utility can be verified. It doesn't seem harmful to let people get excited about it.
Such people should perhaps consider a ceramic-bladed knife. They stay sharp basically forever because the blade is extremely hard, with the downside that it's not repairable with ordinary equipment if chipped. But if the owner would never maintain their metal knife anyway, then it's not _really_ a downside.
They do not stay sharp.
On hard material and when overloaded, they will chip in large, unfixable chunks.
On softer material, they continuously sharpen their edges at a microscopic scale, fracturing away tiny chips as they're worn, to new glassy ceramic molecular edges. A well used ceramic blade becomes micro-serrated.
This sounds fantastic until you think about what is happening to the shards of hard glassy ceramic which briefly become part of your food before becoming part of your gastrointestinal tract.
How much mineral and metal grit does one consume on a regular basis? The ceramic material from a ceramic knife blade is, obviously from just looking at it, very small. I bet the amount of grit I've eaten from having a taste for raw oysters vastly outweighs what I'd get from a lifetime of using ceramic knives.
"grit" is usually spherical or close to it, because it has seen chemical and mechanical weathering. It is often calcium crystals of some type.
This is neither. These are long dagger shapes, significantly larger than a diatom, very hard, sharpened to a fine edge.
They aren't giving you 'microcuts' in your gut, any more than anything else.
Why? The force applied isn't in a uniform downward direction like you would with a knife.
Grit is shaped differently than ultra sharp shards.
If your body didn't have ways to deal with sharp things you eat, we'd never eat fish due to the risk of pin bones. Microscopic shards of ceramic pose very little risk.
Unsubstantiated claim has me convinced!
Found the asbestos salesman.
People can work up to eating fairly large shards of glass. Eating tiny bits of ceramic occasionally are unlikely to be an actual issue any more than ingesting a little bit of sand.
> People can work up to eating fairly large shards of glass.
Sorry, what? Could you perhaps elaborate on this a bit?
Glass eating is a real thing with a surprising number of documented cases. In some cases it’s classified as Hyalophagia a form of Pica where people focus on glass, but it doesn’t necessarily have significant negative side effects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder)
There’s also a magic trick where people eat sugar that’s very clear and looks like glass, but that’s a different thing.
Your defense of how safe eating glass is, is to point out that mentally ill people sometimes do it?
No, I’m saying some mentally ill people consume vast quantities of glass and medical professionals are only concerned with the most extreme cases. It’s like saying the forces involved in a boxing match are a useful benchmark for brain trauma, on that scale a 6 month old infant punching you is so far below that benchmark you don’t need to worry about it.
Which means if you’re worried about consuming 1/100,000th as much it’s clearly not a big deal.
I saw this guy eat a Dell PC once:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Lotito
I used to be a fan, and used them heavily for years. They stay sharp... for a while, and then there's no practical way to re-sharpen them. You get a couple good years out of them and then a lot of mediocre to bad years.
Running a steel knife through an electric sharpener once a month (a 2-minute operation) keeps it feeling consistently like new.
Are there consumer electric sharpeners that you'd recommend? My local grocery store does knife sharpening but it's not super convenient
I use one of these: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/skaerande-knife-sharpener-black...
It's cheaper than an electric sharpener and doesn't carry the risk of taking off too much material from a blade due to overenthusiastic use.
I am 100% certain that there are multiple people on this thread that could tell me I'm getting less optimal results than their tools and/or method. I don't care. I'm getting results that work when I cook. I don't trust myself to get the angle right with a diamond stone.
Pull through sharpening creates an edge that does not last. This channel has great explanations about this and what to do instead: https://youtu.be/pagPuiuA9cY
That is an amazing video. I can confirm that the methods are correct, he mentions exactly what I've been doing for years, explains and demonstrates very clearly.
I linked this elsewhere on the page:
https://www.amazon.com/ChefsChoice-EdgeSelect-Professional-S...
I have one, I use it on my knives every 1-2 months. My knives will last decades rather than "lifetime" but I don't care... they're always sharp and I don't have to work at it. I can buy new knives.
Project Farm has a review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9Lu71ewVSw
You cant use them to chop stuff hitting the board. I have used ceramic knives - they are cool but they indeed chip.
People worry that they will ruin their knives in an attempt to sharpen them. They don't know that they always have the backstop of going to a competent kitchen store and having them sharpened there. I worry about ruining knives with a cheap sharpener I got at IKEA. So I don't buy super expensive knives. I buy commercial grade knives from Dexter and Mercer. I sharpen them to the best of my ability. The results are no doubt inferior to an expert sharpening them, but they're far better than no sharpening or settling for serrated knives.
Keeping knives sharp is just obscure enough of a skill to elude most home cooks. Videos that tell you to judge the angle for sharpening a knife unaided don't help.
I am by no means an expert at sharpening knives but I can get my knives to razor sharp edges on a 20 dollar whetstone and an old pair of jeans glued onto a piece of plywood with some polishing compound on it as a strop. really isn't rocket science to do it right and it would take decades of daily sharpening(no one does this outside of chefs maybe) to make any kind of noticeable dent in the metal. if you can push it through paper(not just slice it) it's more than sharp enough and even a slicing cut on paper is fine.
> People worry that they will ruin their knives in an attempt to sharpen them.
Find a local restaurant supply store and pay like $15 to get it professionally done.
Why there isn’t a bigger business selling diamond stones for the kitchen is a mystery to me. Everyone has a honing steel but that won’t grind a new edge like a proper stone.
I think because people rarely even know what a sharp knife is. Once upon a time being able to sharpen a knife was a mandatory skill in life. Right now unless you are woodworker, leatherworker, hairdresser or professional cook - you rarely know what really sharp means. So you can't compare and demand better.
And with families getting smaller and takeout more popular - the prep work in the kitchen has reduced substantially.
Amy's Trick:
============
You can sharpen (really, burnish) steel knives on a stainless steel sink edge! Stainless steel kitchen sinks are very common in USA.
Gently press the knife blade almost flat against the sink edge and pull the knife handle toward you while moving it to the right (or to the left if you're left-handed). Hold the knife at the angle desired for the blade edge (endless discussions of angle are possible). Of course don't cut yourself.
The motion is similar to that when using a sharpening steel.
Do several times on both sides. Wash and wipe the blade clean. Voila!
A co-worker taught me this trick after I asked how she kept her knife so sharp. I haven't bought or used a knife sharpener since.
Even better trick - you can sharpen knives on the bottom of a tea cup/mug (as long as it is ceramic)... or a piece of brick.
That will knock the burs straight but won't really sharpen the knife (much like a honing rod). After a single use or two your knife will be just as dull as before you knocked the burs straight.
It takes two seconds and you should clean and wipe your knife before use anyway.
I know I'm setting myself up for being picked up, but... I use an older knife that I've never sharpened outside of "occasionally" running it back and forth against a tough fabric. It cuts literally everything just fine; cucumbers, tomatoes, potatoes, etc. Nothing about my use of it _seems_ unsafe; but I expect that's partially because I don't cut very fast. Cooking, when I'm involved, tends to be "social time", where we prep and chat at the same time; so there's no rush.
I'm not saying it's not a good idea to sharpen knives, but a lot of people make it sound like you're a dangerous monster if you don't. And that just doesn't seem to be the case.
> It cuts literally everything just fine
My parents are the same and honestly the sharpness is fine for how they use their knives. I don’t know for yours but theirs don’t cut just fine at all. They barely cut. It’s ok if you actually have to think and push through each cuts but a complete no go for any serious cutting.
It’s a huge waste of time because it prevents any kind of fast work but they don’t know how to safely work with a knife anyway so they don’t notice. My father immediately cut himself the only time I actually sharpened so I stopped trying.
Anyway an ultrasonic knife seems like a cool idea. The technology is common in industrial setting for cutting. I think it’s cool to bring it to a kitchen knife even if it always remains a gimmick.
> outside of "occasionally" running it back and forth against a tough fabric.
As I understand it, that's technically stropping, not sharpening, but it should be sufficient to keep an already-sharp blade sharp over the long term as long as the blade doesn't see extremely heavy use.
That said, most people don't strip their blades any more than they sharpen them.
I’ve seen people use knives on glass cutting boards and granite countertops (directly). They quickly became… not knives? Pieces of pointed sheet metal?
I don’t know, what do you call a previously perfectly fine knife which now is unable to perform any knife like action?
For some reason my daughters love to use my decent knives to cut food on top of ceramic plates and they frequently get tomato crushing dull. I bought an overpriced sharpener that had excellent reviews (from actual knife sharpeners not just Amazon customer reviews) that I think may be a counterfeit from Amazon. I think I just need to learn to sharpen well with stones and hide my knives better.
A dull knife
A dull knife can still cut. I’ve run across ones so dull they couldn’t cut clear tape on packages. Literally just grabs the tape and it rips off . Like I used my finger.
At that point, isn’t it more of a prop?
It is an ex-knife. It's just resting? It's pinning for the fjords.
Beautiful plumage, ain't it?
We moved house recently and I bought some new knives for the kitchen. My wife is now constantly cutting herself because she has no intuition for how sharp a knife should be. I can’t really imagine what the safety argument is against dull knives.
Maybe there's some bell curve of knife skills proficiency where the better you are with knives, the safer they are when sharp, but generally:
Dull knives are more likely to slip on whatever you're cutting (and cut you instead).
They're also more likely to need more force when cutting which means less control.
People say this a lot but the dull knives I have won’t cut my hands around the force required to cut, say, veg. My sharp knife will cut my hand at extremely low levels of force. Also the direction the dull knives can slip is usually along the surface of what I’m cutting which would almost always be away from my hand.
I guess it depends on how dull your dull is.
The knives I consider dull will absolutely cut me if I do something dumb, and I'm much less likely to do something dumb when the blade goes straight through what I'm cutting without having to use any force.
I guess it also depends how and what you're cutting. I sure wouldn't try to julienne carrots with a knife that doesn't easily slice through the carrot.
The telltale sign for me is that chopping an onion causes the layers to separate from pressure before the knife starts to cut in. Super dangerous.
When a large force is applied unintentionally to a finger we have the problem. With a dull knife you need to apply a larger force than with a sharp knife. [The video illustrates this with breaking the skin of the tomato.] For a normal cut this is not a problem.
But - if the knife slips and a large force is applied at the same time - then you will get a large cut.
If the knife slips and a small force is applied, you will get a smaller cut.
If the probability of slipping is the same for sharp and dull knifes, then due to the forces applied, the cuts you get with a sharp knife are less dangerous.
A knife which cannot cut anything isn’t a knife?
It sounds like she literally has no idea how to use a knife.
Is she doesn’t want a knife which can cut things, Butter ‘knives’ are probably more her speed?
What was she even using the ‘knife’ for before if it couldn’t even cut her? Spreading jelly? Slicing cakes?
Not to be snarky, but it’s possible a couples class which covers things like how to use a knife safely might be a fun and enjoyable way out of this.
Have you never used a knife like this? I’ve got one that’s been used by people on plates enough that it’s dull - I can press it into my fingers and pull back and forth and it won’t cut me with pretty reasonable pressure. With more pressure if it’s a glancing thing it’ll not take off a knuckle. I’ve just used it so that I could say this but chopping up a cucumber is totally fine and easy. I can’t cut like I can with my actually sharp knife but it’ll cut stuff.
The ones that bad I ran across couldn’t even cut tape. Like clear, typical tape you’d use on an envelope.
Zero chance of cutting meat, or 90% of vegetables.
Dull knives seem to have destroyed her intuition of how dangerous knives can be and how to use them safely, that's a safety argument right there.
A dull knife you cannot control, is slides across the surface, it can slip. Try cutting onions with a dull knife. You will cry yourself out of the room.
But that's the thing, we _do_ cut onions with our dull knives. And it's never been a problem.
To be fair, you also will cutting onions with a sharp knife.
>> Try cutting onions with a dull knife. You will cry yourself out of the room.
Have you tried that or are you speaking in principle only?
Not the person your asking, but can confirm: a dull knife releases much more of what makes you cry than a sharp one when cutting onions.
I should also ask you then: have you tried that, or are you speaking in principle?
Sorry for the slow reply; it's noticeable in practice. I'm pretty sensitive, and it's usually a good indication that it's time to sharpen knives when I start crying a lot. Sharpening generally improves my onion-cutting experience, unless it's a particularly pungent bag of onions.
I don't use knives in my kitchen. My romantic partner does. Yesterday I decided to cut some tomatoes only to find out that all knives are dull.
She never said anything, I didn't know it. Why?
Because she is just "used" to it and to her these knives were just fine. So she never thought about sharpening knives in the first place.
I will take those knives to a pro and he will sharpen them for me, as in a rental I stay in, I don't have the tools to do that and as I said in another comment - I don't have a pain free process to do that as I don't do it often.
You don't really need "tools" to sharpen knives. You just need a harder surface and some experience. It's one of those things that once you learn you can accomplish with a variety of "tools" because you're just trying to achieve an end goal. There's zero reason you can't sharpen a knife in a rental, lol. You don't need a belt grinder or anything.
People get way too caught up in buying into systems and being told how to do things because it alleviates some anxiety of trying something new. Sharpening knives hasn't really changed much in the last few centuries. Watch a few guides and learn to do it. There's no substitute for experience here. It's also a very transferable skill so it's one that used to be taught in schools but no longer is.
> There's no substitute for experience here. It's also a very transferable skill so it's one that used to be taught in schools but no longer is.
This 100% should be taught in school, it would have been one of the most useful things I could have learned.
When I was in school (in seventies), all boys at least tried to learn how to use and take care of all sharp tools and machines with one up to wood and metal lathe. When I was in school now as a teacher, scissors were the only somewhat sharp things kids were allowed to use. Risk tolerance is so low in our society nowadays, sense of responsibility of children is nonexistent etc.
A semester of machine shop taught me an immense amount, and based on my experience with a lot of techies, 95% more about how the world (and tools) work than 95% of the population.
when I was poor I used to make pricy shaving blades last for months longer than they should have by rubbing them on some old jeans. I don’t remember where I learned it but my roommates thought I was crazy til they tried it.
That’s stropping
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Razor_strop
Nothing crazy about stropping.
Buy a whetstone for $10 and you’re set for life. It’s not complicated! People have been sharpening knives for millennia
$10 whetstones are typically far worse value than $40-$60 whetstones
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5shv-7m5Ic&t=55s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCHzwlGovi0
If she's not used to sharp knives you're not doing her a favour by getting them crazy sharp.
Just get a cheap knife sharpener (not a whetstone) with good reviews and sharpen them a bit once every few weeks, it takes a minute, gets good results, and you can work with her on how sharp they should be.
Most of the time knives that are too sharp are much more dangerous than knives that are too blunt. The people worrying about your knife slipping into your finger have never actually used a knife imo. If it's dull enough to be slipping you'll get a welt before you get cut.
> Most of the time knives that are too sharp are much more dangerous than knives that are too blunt.
With a sharp knife, you cut through food very easily so you use very little force. You also use techniques that prevent you from getting hurt, such as the claw ( https://www.thekitchn.com/knife-skills-the-claw-75998 ).
But if someone has used a dull knife for most of their life, they may not have cultivated these skills and may hold their knife in an unsafe way and or use a lot of force when cutting.
For someone like that, a sharp knife could be a lot more dangerous, but if they're trained/using it properly, a sharp knife is a lot more safe as it reduces effort and chance of the knife slipping.
My thought process was that anyone who is trained or interested would seek to get them sharpened.
I've been in this position and my partner at the time decided to use a separate set of knives from me, as my sharp knives made her focus on the danger and pulled her out of her zoned out cooking-with-a-glass-of-wine mood.
Fair enough, how she approaches tools isn't my decision.
Respectfully, proper technique is just a matter of searching and reading for 2-3 minutes followed by a bit of practice and repetition to get fast. You can skip the getting fast part if you want. Nobody needs "training" to become proficient with a kitchen knife.
She doesn't care. It's not possible to force someone to be a gear nerd.
She cooks, she enjoys it, she does it with a medium sharp knife that doesn't slip because that's not a real thing, and isn't scaring her because it's just medium sharp.
Easy as
>I don't use knives in my kitchen.
How do you not use knives? Do you use some other cutting instrument, that has the same problem as knives (cutting edge needs sharpening at times), do you only purchase pre-sliced food, do you only order take out, or only eat food that never needs cutting, or do you eat food that many or most people would cut in some way (oranges, apples, celery, etc.) by refusing to cut but using your teeth to separate out parts.
Do you not use butter knives or have you removed those from the category knives as their purpose is not really cutting (although I use butter knives to cut cherry tomatoes and garlic as they have no problem with that task)
I'm not trying to harass here, I am just incredibly interested by this statement as I don't think I've ever seen a kitchen without knives (excepting apartments that did not have any residents at the time)
Their partner does all the cooking.
As the parter who does most of the cooking, I'd be pretty annoyed if my parter took it upon themselves to get all my knives sharpened (unless they asked me first and I enthusiastically agreed).
>> I will take those knives to a pro and he will sharpen them for me, as in a rental I stay in, I don't have the tools to do that and as I said in another comment - I don't have a pain free process to do that as I don't do it often
Do you also replace your elderly relatives' Windows XP with linux distros, because linux is a better OS?
The moment you return the sharpened knives to your partner and she starts using them, she'll cut herself, with a small probability for a serious cut that will leave permanent damage to her hand.
Think carefully.
Eventually they will be exposed to sharp knife’s, so probably good to ease their way into it.
Do you mean the sharp knives of surgeons, or are they playing with the Hellraiser cube?
DMT Diamond Sharpeners are fun, especially the ones where you have a milled steel plate that's very flat to which the diamond abrasive is fixed via some nickelplating process. Use one thats "extracoarse" on one side and "fine" (600grit) on the other plus another onsided one with extra fine. Finish with japanese whetstone (synthetic one) and or polishing pashe on a strap of leather. Takes almost no space, can be done at the kitchen table. The equipment costs some, so its probably mostly worth it if you like doing it - sharpening has a meditative quality (wear theowaway gloves)
Yes. These are awesome. They have ones that fold up inside an attached plastic cover (like leatherman) that are great for apartment living, and will sharpen pretty much anything, from filet and paring knives to axes.
This is all very defeatist. Learn to sharpen your knives for your own sake and your... romantic partner. It's a very basic life skill that you should know.
Were you cutting tomatoes with a serrated knife? If not, you should be - they do a far better job.
I cut through tomatoes with my pairing knife all the time, with no resistance, and it has a straight blade.
Yeah if it's sharp enough it'll be fine. All tomato knives are serrated though, they glide through allowing thin, delicate slices.
https://sabre-paris.co.uk/collections/tomato-knife
I've never seen a knife like that where I live, in California. The only small serrated knifes people here have are stake knives and on rare occasions sausage knives.
It's strange how two relatively similar cultures can have such oddball differences.
This is while living in California's Central Valley, where a third of the world's tomatoes are grown, so it's not like tomatoes aren't a major part of the culture here.
I wonder if it's because most of California's settlement was within the last 200 years, with modern metallurgy making it common for knifes to hold their edge long enough to easily cut tomatoes with only occasional sharpening, negating the need for a special knife just for tomatoes.
Nationwide advertisements for knives show people using straight-bladed knives for cutting cucumbers and tomatoes, despite stated stake knives being extremely common, so tomato knives are likely rare throughout the country, not that much of the country is any older than California.
You cant realistically sharpen serrated knives. Having a sharp straight edge knife is quite easy
You can't sharpen a serrated knife, though. When it becomes irritating to cut tomatoes with my straight knife, I know it's time to sharpen it—that's how I avoid getting used to a dull knife.
Can one even sharpen a serrated knife without destroying the teeth? Google search autocomplete shows I'm not the only one wondering that
It’s kind of tedious, but you can do it with a tool like the DMT Diafold Serrated Knife Sharpener. On most serrated knives, you will also want to lightly sharped/deburr the other face at an extremely shallow angle using a whetstone that either you don’t care about too much or that is extremely resistant to scratching (e.g. a DMT-style flat stone). If you do that part on something like a traditional Japanese stone, you will make a mess.
I guess it depends on the style of serrated edge. But if you look at commercial tomato knives you'll see they're all serrated.
Is that just because they not expected to be sharpened though?
I don't think so, not at home.
This seems like a sign that going into business selling knives based on their sharpness or apparent sharpness is a bad idea.
I've tried sharpening knives a few times in my life and I've never been able to tell the difference. I agree with the principle, but in practice I simply haven't witnessed it matter.
I've had the same experience with the pull through sharpeners, but I bought a cheap 2-sided Japanese waterstone and learned to use it (not very well) and the difference it makes is very noticeable despite my lack of skill. It does however take me maybe 15 minutes to sharpen a knife.
It matters most for two things: safety and efficiency.
Unsharp knives cut well enough, and I would assume that people's knife skills and/or cooking skills may not notice the difference.
Do you follow a mise en place approach to cooking?
I think you might be bad at sharpening knives. There is no shame in that, almost everyone is very bad at it, it's difficult to do it properly.
No doubt there! But since I can get a (cheap) knife set from Walmart for under $10, I simply don’t care to bother improving.
> almost everyone is very bad at it
[citation needed]
It's more that sharpening a knife - like many other skills - takes practice.
most people don't even know how to properly hone a knife since there are specific movements.
i would recommend anyone sending their knives to a professional for sharpening -- you will feel much more confident cutting, and everything will be safer.
It's not really that hard to learn how to hone a knife. There's different techniques that work and I'd think anyone who loves to cook regularly hones their knives anyway.
Now, sharpening is a bit of a different story but also totally achievable with a little investment (money for some stone(s) and time for practice). But you're right, if you cannot be bothered to do that yourself, it's definitely better to have your knives sharpened professionally than to use dull knives in the kitchen.
Yes, and like all other skills that take practice, most people are miserable at it. If you honestly think the opposite, I think maybe we live on different planets.
That's easy. You have mouth full of even duller blades that will do in a pinch and for most foods any knife is already overkill.
And why should they care if it works for them?
Because they generally don’t work and people don’t know any better.
Duller knives cut more slowly, hence if I cut my finger, I feel it before it goes deeper, which is safer.
Such knife seems like a disaster waiting to happen, I can't see the benefit honestly.
This isn’t how it works. Duller blades are more dangerous because when you cut with a dull blade you have to push harder and then that blade can do things you’re not anticipating.
Have you spent any serious time in the kitchen? Sharp blades are incredibly important for… cutting.
People say duller blades are more dangerous yet all the times I've seriously hurt myself were just after I'd gotten it sharpened.
I've seen chefs arguing the other way around. You have to apply more pressure when using duller knives, this means less control and less safety.
I agree, but this is more about stopping when you get hurt. I cook everyday and hurt myself only with very sharp knifes as I couldn't feel when the knife was about to cut my skin.
That's an issue of skill and technique.
For trained chefs, the sharper blade means things stay in place as expected, because the weight and motion of the blade are cutting, and not force exerted.
Related: I watch chefs use a mandolin, no freaking way I'd use it the way they do. I just do not have the skills necessary to free hand it. I will use a safety glove and/or a guard.
> People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives
With a mass market electric sharpener and a reasonable knife I spend maybe 15 minutes/yr on sharpening and the knife + sharpener costs less than half this product
The marketing video seems to try to head people like me off, but it also seems to wildly overstate the level of commitment required to have sharp knives
(I do think the tech is cool tho. I just wouldn’t pay $400 for an 8 inch chef’s knife no matter how good it is)
To embrace a stereotype, there are two types of people in the kitchen: Tool enthusiasts and food enthusiasts.
The tool enthusiast has beautiful Japanese steel knives treated as family heirlooms; the knives are sent out for professional sharpening once or twice a year.
The food enthusiast has a pile of fibrox knives and a chef's choice electric sharpener. The knives go through the sharpener once a month and the dishwasher daily; the knives get replaced every decade or two.
The tool enthusiast's knives are pretty, but the food enthusiast's knives always pass the paper test.
Nobody has ever complemented me "wow, this meal was prepared with such pretty knives!"
Most people I know never sharpen their knives. My grandmothers (both of whom cooked for all branches of the family every day when I was a kid) never did. I think if a knife got too dull they simply chucked it out and got a new one. And probably cut themselves a few times until it got dulled enough.
Anyway that's three kinds of people: two kinds of foodies, and everyone else.
How can you know your grandmothers never sharpened it? In my experience grandmothers tend to have a steel lying in a drawer and use it at least before cutting through expensive meat. And they use professional sharpening services once in a year. You wouldn’t actually notice as a child.
Yeah, sorry my comment was a bit misleading. I spent a lot of time around my grans when I was a kid, and later as a young adult and a ... less young adult? We lived in the same houses (two, because my parents were divorced). They didn't sharpen knives. They both took great pride in their cooking, but they would just stare at you if you asked them about things like knife skills or mise en place. They were Greek housewives not French chefs.
I'm pretty sure we didn't have "professional sharpening services" either, when I was growing up in Greece. I think I've seen men with whetstones on their backs in old movies, or paintings, but I've never seen anyone like that live. Nor do I remember any shop that did that sort of work.
Why is it so hard to believe that housewives rarely sharpen knives? It even rhymes.
Maybe they understood you better if you didn't insist on speaking french? Arranging your ingredients when mixing them comes pretty naturally to most people even if they don't know a fancy phrase for it.
Thanks for elaborating. I am sure the food was great. Since the proposition rhymes, it must be true :)
Your kitchen example also functions as allegory for software development
Most importantly, buying useful things, that will likely be used for a long time and contain about as much e-waste as a single-use vape.
> People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives
I am ashamed to admit it, but I have been happily using this 5,99 EUR IKEA knife sharpener for nearly 10 years know:
https://www.ikea.com/de/en/p/aspekt-knife-sharpener-black-57...
I use it 1-2 times a month for 30 seconds on the 2 knives I use in the kitchen. They pass the paper test. Previously, I used the bottom of a coffee mug.
That being said, thinks like [0] do exist and people seem to buy them.
[0] https://www.horl.com/us/en/sharpeners/
No need to be ashamed, if it works it works. Whetstones look cooler but they do the same job. I actually bought the same device at a local knife store for my parents and the clerk said it was perfect if you just want to get sharp knives and be done with it. Whetstones or professional sharpening is more useful for pros or knife hobbyists/enthusiasts.
> they do the same job
The quality of the job is vastly different, though. This video shows great examples:
https://youtu.be/0uy5NrLEZ4g?si=mxAUrFxAFX_xHrFv
In the comments it reveals this guy is using the sharpener wrong by doing way too many pulls with too much pressure.
The cheap ikea one is fine, it will not wear out your blade. 2-3 pulls at very light pressure, no need to learn how to use a whetstone properly, perfect UX for those who don’t typically sharpen knives.
The video provides no test of the unsharpened sonic knife performances, so any claim made are instintively fishy marketing, however cool the product may be, it was fresh out of packaging, what happens once the blade is dull? If we have to sharpen it it instantly loses all it's value.
also, no test on power armor, I don't think they have identified their core market.
> ...you are never going to make meaningful progress by telling consumers to feel bad for buying fun things.
I think it's a worthwhile message to tell folks that we, collectively, should be mindful about the resources we consume and the waste we produce. For such razor-thin (lol) gains in QoL, I think it's worth reminding people to consider whether it is worth the huge increase in waste. Knives are metal and wood/plastic... awfully efficient tools for the work they get done.
EDIT: And to balance the negativity, I _love_ the Seattle Ultrasonics logo.
You're not entirely wrong but the selective outrage (on e-waste) here is 100% off balance.
I'm surprised there isn't moralizing about the price point. I don't see why the US is so far behind in manufacturing efficiency. Everything seem to be 10-100x the cost of comparable Chinese goods, and US labor isn't paid anywhere close to 100x more.
Why would manufacturing cost come into play? Isn't it a given that a company will charge as much as they can get away with charging? Cost of labor and material I understood to only matter at the absolute bottom of a highly commoditized market e.g., bolts or capacitors or whatever. This is the only consumer ultrasonic knife (as far as I know) so they can charge whatever.
Eh, it's pretty clear this price point isn't driven by manufacturing. It's driven by being a bespoke item with tons of R&D costs that need to be recouped.
If this turns into a significant market, I'm sure the cost will plummet.
This episode of the Search Engine podcast goes into detail about that:
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-puzzle-of-the-all-...
Did you mean the Search Engine podcast..?
I did. Thanks for the correction.
Is it that they cannot sell it for cheaper or that this price will maximize profits?
> I'm a bit surprised to see how much snark there is in the comment sections of this video.
It's "slashdot talks about the iPod announcement" all over again.
Unfortunately, communities tend to devolve other time into empty cynicism and negativity, and it's hard to stop, since obviously you don't want to ban 100% of cynical or negative comments.
> since obviously you don't want to ban 100% of cynical or negative comments.
Probably would be a net positive if we did.
How would we find out the real sentiment if negative comments were all filtered out?
I guess it depends on how you define negative.
"I don't think this is something I would use." or "I think the price point is too high for what you get." aren't particularly negative to me.
"Nobody should buy this, it's dumb." or "Who even needs something like this, just learn to sharpen knives!" are.
Concerns about safety aren't moralising, and this isn't just a "sharper kitchen knife".
First, on sharpness, it takes me about 15 minutes once a week to sharpen my cleaver, two chef's knives, paring knife and breadknife. I could spend another half an hour or so and get them to razor sharpness, but I don't because I don't need or want that level of sharpness for kitchen work. Therefore, while something that eliminates that 15 minute task could be of value to me (though personally I rather enjoy the process), something that provides a sharper edge is not.
Secondly, even if I were to use razor-sharp knives, there's a limit to the damage they will do to my hands in a typical accident. In particular, even a razor sharp knife will usually stop at the bone. I don't know if this knife will because this advert didn't address safety at all, but given ultrasonic knives are used for cleanly cutting through bones in surgery [1] it's reasonable to suspect it might not. Adding to my chef's knives the ability to smoothly pass all the way through my finger would not be an upgrade in my view [2].
Lastly, to raise questions about a product's safety is not "moralising". If I were to say that you shouldn't use this knife because of safety concerns, that could be viewed as a moral position, but I don't care about that at all. You can use chainsaws and flamethrowers in your kitchen for all I care. When I say I would be unlikely to buy this thing without some information on what it will do to my hand in the event of a kitchen accident, that's just a choice I am free to make as a consumer.
[1] https://www.cheersonic.com/portfolio-items/ultrasonic-bone-c...
[2] As it is, I have what seems to be permanent scarring and some loss of sensation on my left thumb from cutting it to the bone with my breadknife a year ago, and my mind replays the trauma every time I pick that knife up. (No, the knife was not blunt. It was brand new at the time, and I've since maintained it to the same level of sharpness it had then, using a ceramic sharpening rod and a whetstone for the tip. The accident was due to me being distracted and positioning my hand incorrectly. And yes, better technique would have prevented it, but I'm not and never will be a trained chef. Had I used this ultrasonic knife I expect I would have taken the end of my thumb off.)
Overall agree it seems cool, and maybe interesting.
"People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives,"
The former, totally agree - i've seen people buy a tormek to do basic knife sharpening (not grinding), which is like swatting a fly with an $800 hammer.
The latter, do you mean overall, or in a sitting or what?
I've certainly seen people on various forums go nuts, and then you have hertzmann staring at knife edges with an SEM, but even if i did it completely by hand with shaptons, it takes like 15 minutes, max, to sharpen 10 knives, through an entire insane grit progression (which i do for plane blades when i need to cleanly slice end grain without going to a super high-angle plane or something. For knives, i was just trying to get a comparison point, i use electric sharpeners in practice).
Or approximately 2 minutes with an electric knife sharpener.
While sure, there is a difference when i put them under my digital inspection microscope, either can slice paper towel cleanly and easily (slicing paper is easy, slicing paper towel ends to be hard because any burr catches really easily)
Are there really even semi-normal people out there spending hours to sharpen knives?
If so, like, why?
(Obviously, again, if they need to be reground because you knicked it really badly, sure that takes a bit, but beyond that)
None of these steels are tough enough to require all that many strokes (it's pretty easy to test it with a marker and see when you remove the marking), and if you are using super custom steels (RIP Crucible :(), carbide, or ceramics, you need CBN or diamond anyway, but the same is still true - given the correct abrasive material, sharpening knives is just not that slow.
I actually travel with an electric knife sharpener if we are going to be staying in an airbnb somewhere for >1 week and are cooking most nights. It's the most consistent thing about airbnb - no matter what level of luxury, etc, they always have many knives, and all of them are dangerously dull. It still doesn't take more than a few minutes to sharpen them all.
I spend hours every 6 months or so sharpening knifes on whetstones. I like the excuse to have some me time, listen to an audiobook or just do some thinking. Akin to meditation.
I also dont like the blades ruined through automatic sharpeners - the knifes are made of good quality steel, were made to order in Jp, and have sentimental value. I also sharpen the cheap knifes this way, tho - I like manual work.
Do you not sharpen them in between? I've had to spend hours sorting out knives that have been left far too long without sharpening, but my routine is to spend about 15 minutes sharpening them every weekend. Then they're always sharp and never get into a terrible state and need remedial work.
My knives get noticeably suboptimal in a couple of weeks without sharpening, so if I left it 6 months they'd be blunt pretty much all the time.
Usual advice is that you need to straighten your blade every week or two and then you can sharpen it every 6 months or even a year (depends on usage of course). To straighten the blade you use honing rod which many people mistake for sharpener.
I have a steel honing rod but it's never seemed to have much effect. Perhaps my technique isn't right.
I also have a ceramic sharpening rod, which I use to sharpen my breadknife. That's very effective, but different as it actually removes steel. I give my straight-edged knives a few strokes on each side on a 3000 grit whetstone every weekend, which seems to keep them nicely sharp. That will slowly wear them down but it hasn't done so noticeably yet so I expect the knives to last many years.
So this I understand for sure. If it is a relaxing thing for you, cool. There are plenty of things I do by hand for the same reason.
The people I worry about are the ones stropping a single knife 6000 times because they think it truly matters to cutting tomatoes
What should one look for in an electric knife sharpener? It’s hard to search as there’s so much content farming. I’m UK based. Are they worth it compared to a simple “drag through” thing?
I got a single decent knife: https://wusthof.com/products/wusthof-classic-8-cooks-knife-1...
But I’m worried about ruining it, and the “care instructions” seem to mention using a whetstone.
Buy one of these:
https://www.amazon.com/ChefsChoice-EdgeSelect-Professional-S...
But you have to let go of the "ruining it" fear. Sharpening a knife does ruin it, you're taking off a tiny amount of material each time. Since your knife is full bolster, you'll eventually notice a small difference in height of the blade at the bolster.
Yes you will ruin the knife over decades of sharpening. In the mean time you have a wicked sharp knife that's a joy to use (not just look at). It's a tool not an art piece.
Since you seem knowledgeable about knives, Do you know any great knives makers? And are those custom steels or carbide blades worth it?
So far, I mostly sharpen my knives on the back of a plate. So definitely could be doing more :)
Most people can buy an opinel and be happy for decades. You don't need anything fancy for a general purpose knife. $50 max, and that's if you're feeling like getting something special.
Expensive steels are, by and large, incremental progress over cheaper knife steels, provided it got an appropriate heat treatment and has good edge geometry. In almost no applications will an end consumer notice the difference.
Knives get stupid beyond a certain price point.
I've been using the same thrift store knife I picked up 15 years ago. It gets sharpened maybe once a year, honed every so often. It was like $20 i think? Most chefs I know have a similar story with their knife/knives, something cheap that does the job.
Spending more on knives is just status symbol nonsense, which unfortunately has infected absolutely everything. It's like spending $300 on a spanner wrench. Who in the hell spends that much on a wrench? Why would you spend that much on a knife? lol. It's what you do with it that matters.
I remember seeing a comment by a local "celebrity chef" where he said he never sharpens cleavers - he just buys a specific inexpensive brand 5 at a time for $8 each and throws them away when they become dull.
While I don't agree with externalising the manufacture/disposal costs with that sort of disposable consumption, I do see the economically-rational decision making behind it.
If you're running a restaurant in Australia, your lowest paid kitchen staff get $24 an hour during weekdays, 30-35 and hour on weekends, and as much as $55 an hour on public holidays. And if they work more than 8 hours in a day it's 1.5 times those rates for the first 2 hours of overtime, and double those rates for anything more than 2 hours overtime. https://www.fairwork.gov.au/find-help-for/fast-food-restaura...
While spending 15 or 20 seconds honing the edge with a sharpening steel during use makes sense (and I'll bet he does that just out of reflex), once the edge gets damaged enough to need more that what a steel can fix and you start needing a whetstone, it's probably not cost effective to have kitchen staff spend time doing that.
If a dull knife takes whole 5 minutes to sharpen, it's 12 knives an hour. At $8 per knife, this is $96 per hour. Not worth it during deep overtime during a public holiday, otherwise...
I suppose someone less handsomely paid collects these disposed knives, sharpens them, and resells them on the side.
I'd take issue with your price point but agree with the sentiment
I've seen victorinox fibrox knives in Michelin Star kitchens, they get the job done and are very reasonably priced ($60 for a chef's knife).
Admittedly the knives I have at home are significantly more expensive largely because the knives I have at home are on display so I want something that looks good and I actually enjoy using them.
On one level it's a little silly but then on another level people spend thousands on art/sculptures which has no useful purpose.
There are lots of great knife makers. Depends on what you want. Knives become about aesthetics and feel pretty quickly, price point wise. Not cutting functionality (ease of cutting, whatever).
Victorinox knives rank very well in just about any real-use ranking I’ve ever seen and are extremely affordable. If you just want good knives that will serve you well, won’t break the bank, and you won’t feel bad using them, that’s what I would do. There are other good recommendations in the thread as well.
As for custom steels - outside of currently very expensive processes (powdered metallurgy, etc), it is basically “maximum sharpness”, “edge retention”, “ease of sharpening”, pick maybe two. Edge retention here is shorthand for both brittleness (chipping) and abrasion resistance (regular wear), even though they differ for some things.
High grade carbide, for example, is extremely tough and resists edge abrasion. But because of the large grain size it is ~impossible to get it as sharp as carbon steel by hand. Additionally, the same abrasion resistance also means you need something hard enough to sharpen it.
If you remember those little scratch kits you may have played with once in science class as a child where you tried to see which rocks scratches other rocks, this is the practical application of that.
Even in metalworking people will often make or use hss cutters when they need something really really sharp or custom. Or just cheap. And use carbide ones when they don’t. Because you really can’t get carbide as sharp as HSS and sometimes it matters. I can also easily make a really good HSS cuttter, but making a really good carbide one would take significantly more expensive tooling and time.
This is one example.
Ceramic knives[1] tend to have very high edge retention, but are very brittle and fracture easily. So it's very easy to nick them. This makes them last forever if you are slicing but not if you are chopping. They are also ~impossible to sharpen without diamonds.
In the end - we can construct steels and other things with very nice properties at high cost, and it's cool and fun to explore the limits there, but it’s not going to make you a better chef, or make your prep 10x faster or whatever. This isn't to say it's completely impossible to make somethign that is awesome at everything, but we use what we use because we can make them without nudging atoms into a matrix one by one :)
So while it's possible to get 5x the edge life out of an impossible to sharpen knife (for example), for most people, it's not worth it. They don't even notice once the novelty wears off.
[1] Tungsten carbide is really a ceramic but people often mistake it for a metal/steel, when in reality it's often just alloyed/glued/etc to metals, etc. Assume i'm not talking about tungsten here.
I admire you. You are a minority, you know that, right?
I don't have time in my schedule at the moment, which says "sharpen the knifes". So for me - it would be amazing if someone solved this problem in a radical way.
Sporadically I would sharpen the knives and since I don't have it in my "skills" section of the brain, I always have to "figure out" sharpening process.
You know you can buy a <$5 gadget you drag the knife across a few times for 10s that gets it about 95% as sharp as a professional job? Zero skill or attention required.
Dont have time in your schedule...jeeze. Sounds like learned helplessness to me. That or spoiled rotten. The comments in this thread help me understand the general animosity towards the tech industry from much of the population.
I have one of those "roller" sharpeners, in theory a "good" one, it's from Global (the Japanese knife brand) not just an AliExpress knockoff.
It works reasonably well and is definitely quick. But its not even close to "95% as sharp) as when I spend 10 mins with my Lansky sharpening kit (which is really just a small set of graduated whetstones with a jig to keep the angle right while using it).
Would I recommend everybody spend $70 or so for a bottom end Lansky kit or similar? No. Not even close. But if cook a lot, and you're going to buy "nice" knives that you intend to keep for decades, and you notice and care about the difference between sharp and dull knives - then I'd suggest you at least consider it.
>But its not even close to "95% as sharp
Admittedly I have not made a comparison but I've seem some youtube vids where they compete various sharpening gadgets vs the pro way. They all seem to do very well even at bottom barrel prices. I'm sure defects are higher though.
That lansky looks awesome I think I'll pick it up. I think the crowd on here will see this basic life skill as too much "work".... so thats why I recommend the cheap drag through's. Safer than a dull knife at least... Weird how so many people here have no issue churning thorough another JS framework but spending 10 min to learn a life skill is too hard.
The roller/drag-through thing is worthwhile owning, I use mine a lot more often than I get out the Lansky kit. It's probably a couple of times a month I'll find my usual knife is smooshing ripe strawberries or tomatos a bit instead of effortlessly slicing them, and a few swipes through the fine wheel on mine will make that knife slice nicely again. Mostly I get out the Lansky tools when I've damaged a knife, then I'll sit at my workbench will all my knives and spend an hour or two in a Zen knife edge grinding trance making everything stupidly/dangerously sharp. The ultra-fine ceramic hone in my kit does an amazing job, but you need to work up to it through the coarser grade hones - especially if you've been using the roller sharpener on that knife for a bit - I'm pretty sure they don't get the edge angles right in a way the the ultras fine hone can take advantage of.
I really like my Lansky kit. In retrospect I might have shelled out the extra for the set with the diamond sharpening stones - but I doubt I'll ever come close to wearing down the regular stones with my use patterns.
> I always have to "figure out" sharpening process.
Get the Worksharp fixed angle sharpener for about $70 (about the price of 2 decent stones). If you're really interested, get the leather strop add on for about $10. Get on with sharpening your kitchen knives. Put it in your closet until next year.
Is it "great"? No. If you want to be a knife nerd, it's not for you.
If you have a couple of kitchen knives you need to sharpen once a year, it's absolutely fine. And you don't have to "get the feel" of sharpening again before you can get sharp kinves.
Even with the stones and equipment I have, it is way more mindless and a lot less messy to simply use a fixed-angle sharpener. Sure, you won't get "The Ultimate Hair Whittling Edge(tm)", but your knives will quite readily Julienne your vegetables.
Reiterating that any sharpener with the ability to set the angle is really all anyone needs if they don't want to invest in the time of learning how to sharpen.
I have the ruixin version and it works fine. I like that I can use the stones without the system.
Sure. Most fixed angle sharpeners work to some degree, I just recommended one that isn't sold by "Random Letter Chinese Shop" and that I have bought and know personally works.
In addition, for the moment, the stones used in the system I recommended are reliably decent and have been analyzed by a bunch of the YouTube knife nerds. The other fixed angle systems can be hit or miss with the stones.
If someone is sufficiently interested that they want to use the stones without the system, they've started down the path to being a knife nerd and have outgrown my recommendation.
In Japan I could just drop my knife in a nearby house's box with $6, they'd sharpen it and phone me to pick it up within a few hours. Cheap enough that I never bothered to do it myself.
If anyone doubts the efficiency of ultrasonic cutters may I recommend this Old (Tony) video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFeek0a8s7Q
I have a knife sharpener in my drawer that I use to sharpen my Wursthof knives .. and end up with sharp knives as a result.
How would this make my life much better?
Pro tip, often the early comments on HN are negative. Give it some time.
This is also make takeaway. I have noticed this more and more on this site. Everything is criticized to an insane degree. If someone hasn't solved world hunger, while at the same time making money and curing their grandma of Alzheimer it will not be received well.
Oh good for them if they cure grandma of Alzheimer's. That's REALLY gonna help those of us whose grandmas are already dead.
E-waste can be solved without reducing the number of items. Just requires basic investments in recycling.
Recycling is a sham. There is mostly no efficient recycling of sufficiently advanced components, the industry just spent decades on making you think you can buy lots of cheap things and all that trash isn’t your problem. Well it is.
With enough energy we can separate anything into its elemental constituents.
“Recycling” as mentioned by the US press is a scam because we had humans walking over our trash in India manually recycling in such a dangerous way they banned our recycling.
Anything can be ground into dust and sent through a series of physiochemical processes to reconstitute.
Well. The "recycling" we’re talking about in this thread is a greenwashing lie to make consumers feel better about their irresponsible consumption.
The recycling you’re talking about is a science fiction trope, and utterly irrelevant here, because we don’t have a way of expending that much energy, let alone generate economically (or ecologically).
Elsewhere on the thread I pointed out that I'd noticed the video doesn't show anybody doing actual prep; making an easy but deliberate thin slice of a tomato is one thing, quickly dicing an onion or a bell pepper is a very different thing.
To that observation I'd add (h/t my Slack friends) this interesting site Seattle Ultrasonics stood up:
https://seattleultrasonics.com/pages/knife-database
One thing I notice here is that Japanese knives (and my trusty MAC) fare really well on the BESS and CATRA scale, but relatively poorly on the "Food Cutting Rank", which is based on an ad-hoc seeming performance scale of how well their robot fared with a bunch of cutting tests that included stuff like bread and cheese (h/t again Slack friends) --- which nobody uses a chef's knife to cut.
That's a weird scale to plot chef's knives across --- unless the purpose of building that scale was to showcase an electronic knife that does well on tasks people don't normally use chef's knives for, but maybe not as well on chef knife daily driver tasks.
A talented chef might cut vegetables at 25hz, while the blade is moving at 44khz. So whatever cutting improvement is conferred by the ultrasonic tech will certainly be applied towards fast cutting. It seems that the main benefit for fast cutting would be that food doesn't stick to the blade.
I'll cut bread with my chef's knife (amazon shun knockoff) when I want to make less of a mess. One interesting thing I noticed is that when Scott was cutting bread in the video he was cutting a croissant and no crumbs fell.
It will be interesting to see the knife in the hands of real chefs. Two things I'm curious about are whether the ergonomics of the button are good, and whether the ultrasonic action atomizes foods as they're being cut, changing the experience of cooking in some way.
I'd really like to see a citation for 25 Hz. It feels to me like a decimal point might be missing. And how does the knife moving at twice the frequency of the vegetables being cut work? do they do two complete cycles of the knife for every cut of the veges? that's not what I've seen watching cooking shows (which might not be the best thing to watch for this to be seen, of course)
Hz vs kHz. Your parent's point is that the knife is vibrating far faster than even the fastest chefs would be slicing.
25 chops per second would be EXTRAORDINARY. Possible? Probably but only with super elite training. Most competent home chefs can probably do 5 Hz and probably struggle to get to 10 Hz.
The fastest button mashing record appears to be 16 Hz, so I definitely do not believe it is possible to chop with a knife in the double digits.
Can somebody count Jacques' garlic chopping speed then? Perhaps someone younger than 80 could do it faster? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H3ENOZgEqXg#t=1m20s
Looks like around 12Hz, counting the forward rock and back rock as distinct chops. I'm not sure a rocking motion is what people mean here, though. This only works for mincing something you've already cut up, not slicing an onion.
Maybe the solution is an ultrasonic slap chop? (https://www.amazon.com/Slap-Chop-Stainless-Vegetable-Accesso...) Many slices at once, preserve whatever the ingredient is without crushing it, doesn't stick to the blade. It may sound ridiculous, but if it makes kitchen prep easier and faster, I might cook more.
The sixteenth notes in "Crazy Train"[1] are nominally 552 per minute, or 9.2 Hz. Moving a knife at 10 Hz is probably very difficult. I would expect 2-3 Hz is a normal pace for a skilled knife user and 4-5 Hz is showing off.
1: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tMDFv5m18Pw#t=0m32s
Cerebellar oscillation (in the inferior olive) gate motor control interrupt speed and are generally limited to ~10 Hz in humans.
That escalated quickly. Thank you!
Which is why humans use tech and tricks to get things done. Gravity Blast is one example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir_KZNsTNiQ
Damn, I was set to completely dismiss this as entirely useless overcomplication but making stuff not stick to the knife would be nice.
That’s where a lot of mess comes from, so I’m very interested in this tech. The worst are cucumbers, they stick to the blade and new slices pop them up and they roll everywhere. I get some better results by slightly angling the blade but it’s not perfect.
The blade quality doesn’t look great but I think any decent cook that knows how to hone will do just fine with it.
I’m not sure I’d spend the money and replace my expensive knives for a relatively rare edge case but it’s a neat innovation that might catch on elsewhere, or maybe they’ll make premium lines.
> The worst are cucumbers, they stick to the blade
Is this issue possibly that amateur knives are too "polished"?
This doesn't seem to be a "professional chef" problem yet seems to be a significant "amateur chef" problem.
Is this simply the case that a knife with professional use takes enough dings and scratches that foods won't vacuum seal to the face of the knife?
Technique. Pros use a slicing motion that moves the knife through the food before it detaches, home cooks use 5% of the blade and all the cucumber rounds are stuck to same place on the side of the middle of the knife.
Maybe instead of building it into the knife, it needs to be something you could attach to any knife
Interesting idea, but I would say that it is orders of magnitude harder compared to having an integrated system. Vibration in such a compact space with a very sharp blade... I want this system be stable around me.
I would say, if this idea becomes popular, knife producers can create their own versions in the new models, or retrofit old knives at the shop.
Yeah, I'm already somewhat skeptical of the whole concept, having DIY'd a vibroblade out of an X-acto knife and a SonicCare toothbrush and finding it to be completely ineffective.[1]
I think trying to make an ultrasonic vibration add-on for regular knives would be even harder to make into a useful product than an integrated knife/transducer.
If the handle is rigidly fixed to the blade, there would be very little vibration. So it seems like the only way to make an add-on would be as a sleeve over the regular handle. That would make for a bulky handle, and it seems like it would need a counterbalancing weight at the back. So the result would be very unwieldy, like one of those electric turkey-carving knives that are basically kitchen hedge-trimmers.
I'm waiting to see what skilled chefs think of this knife. The idea of an ultrasonic vibroblade has always seemed like a neat one to me, and I'd be happy to hear that someone managed to make one that was genuinely useful.
[1] https://www.beneaththewaves.net/Projects/SonicCarereg_Lock_P...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/ultrasonic-...
The premise is obviously sound, though it's possible this particular product doesn't work very well.
Ultrasonic cutting board. "Are you tired of spending $1800 on a whole set of ultrasonic knives only to have them break every time your Brother in law throws them in a bowl of soapy water after a dinner party? Well know you don't have to. Image buying 6 cheap knives at a garage sale and turning them into chefs quality knives instantly, without even touching a sharpener!"
That's a pretty good idea.
If this was a small 40$ attachment you could put on the dull edge of any knife, this would be great.
The thing you are looking for is convex edge geometry https://youtu.be/cZ2Y7lyzq24?t=885. Done right it can massively help with food release.
Cucumbers: put your cutting board in a sheet pan. Now they roll away but stop at the rim.
Also works for helping with fluid containment.
I had a similar problem with spring onions. So I give them a lengthways slice first. The half moons don't roll.
I mean, for both potatoes and cucumbers, I just use a v-slicer. $40.
The other weird thing about this is that neither a potato nor a cucumber demands an ultra-sharp knife.
if you have a nice knife and cut by dragging the knife towards you with tip in contact with the board instead of cutting directly down, food will not stick
The video comparison of this knife cutting through potato compared to a regular one is very enticing. My own experience is that there is more sticking even on my knives that have those scooped out edges that are supposed to prevent sticking.
Yeah, those do reduce sticking, but they certainly don’t prevent it entirely.
I'm not saying it can't work, just that they didn't show it, and after the required thin-tomato-slice that's the thing I'd most want to see the knife doing.
For reference it would be also nice to see your (and your Slack friends) knife handling skills.
Wh...why? I'm not selling anything. I'm just saying dicing an onion is a better test of a chef's knife than taking a single thin slice of a tomato. Seems like that's an argument you can just take on directly.
I don't think there's anything interesting about my onion dice. You'd be seeing a video of a banged up MAC, scraped up from all the times I've casually sharpened it in a hurry, doing the standard one-cross-cut Jacques Pepin onion dice. You know, an onion dice.
(The "Slack friend" thing was just that I felt bad about sharing a link I'd gotten just a few minutes while pretending as if I'd known about it myself. I have no idea their level of expertise! Probably better than mine though.)
I was getting the impression that you are "selling" the fact that the performance of this knife is based on false advertising, and using personal anecodes and some anonymous people as a supporting argument. That's basically the only issue.
Aside from that, in my opinion dicing an onion is a much more simple task for a knife than taking a very thin slice of a tomato. And in both cases it is likely more about the technique/handling and the sharpening than the actual knife material or technology. But the average person does not care about those things, so this knife could at least in principle be something useful for them. Not for someone who is willing to invest some time in the aforementioned things though, like you (and me too, for that matter).
No I genuinely don't know if this is a useful product or not. I think it would be a more interesting world if it was, so I guess I'm rooting for it. But I've got those two indications that I should be wary: nobody really used the knife in the video, and he did that weird knife ranking that happens (in a weird way) to probably favor his new electronic knife.
Well, I can't speak to "false advertising", but the thin slice he did with the tomato and the grape you can just achieve with a well-sharpened knife. Both sides of a whetstone and then a strop will get you there.
As for the sticking, this is solved by vertical fluting already.
Ultrasonic vibration is a complicated solution for a problem that has already been solved by the simple solution of just sharpening your knives. And you don't need to get expensive either. A Sharpal diamond stone, leather strop and a good workhorse knife like a Victorinox Santoku will get you there :)
He acknowledges you can do that with a well-sharpened knife. Of course you can do it with a well-sharpened knife. It's exactly the demo every single sharp knife does! His claim is that the ultrasonic knife will always do that cut, whether or not you assiduously keep it sharp, which is what I have to do with my MAC and Yuki to make it cut tomatoes like that.
But most chef-knife cutting isn't thin tomato slices, and you can always do that cut with a good thin serrated bread knife, too. I want to see it dice an onion. Seems like a small ask.
Yep, I have a Shun with micro serrations ([0]) that will slice a tomato so finely you basically feel no resistance.
The only downside is that you can’t really hone or sharpen it yourself so you have to baby it. I’ve had mine about 15 years and have sent it in one time for their free sharpening at about the 11 year mark. At least Shun blades hold their edge a really long time.
[0]: https://shun.kaiusa.com/classic-serrated-utility-6.html?srsl...
> As for the sticking, this is solved by vertical fluting already.
This is absolutely NOT "solved." I have such knifes and potatoes stick nearly as bad. To the point I have wondered if they make it worse.
> It will be interesting to see the knife in the hands of real chefs.
Not really? I feel like this is for the other people, the folks who don't have the training to use a chefs knife super well. I'd rather see a decent home cook compare it to their knife in general prep.
The two things that stood out to me:
"The best tools shouldn't only be accessible to the pros" but his knife costs more than every knife in that database.
The weight is listed in their help articles as 330g. I also think that handle is chunkier than a typical high end chef's knife. It may be easier to cut things with it, but I think your hand and arm are going to get tired of using it more quickly than with a regular knife at ~100g less.
And I realize these fare worse than the high end japanese and german knives, but it's hard to get excited about a $400 knife you can't put in the dishwasher when you can get a perfectly credible fibrox knife for about a tenth of that, which doesn't require charging and can tolerate 'careless home cook' levels of abuse.
I don't think anyone who cares about the cutting experience would put a knife into a dishwasher.
I regularly put mine in the dishwasher. I cook a lot. I have kids. I also own sharpening stones.
For me, this works better than increasing the amount of hand dishes I have to do.
What are you doing with your knives that washing them is a chore? Prep the food, run water on it, and back on the magnet bar it goes.
Cutting garlic or meat will both require more cleaning than just a rinse.
You're supposed to keep a glass of water with a bit of chlorine bleach (to obtain roughly 300 ppm) handy for wiping your tools and surfaces down as you work. Not that anyone teaches Home Economics at school any longer.
This is what I learned in cooking school but also never actually saw in practice in restaurants I worked in (which were fine-ish dining in the Bay Area).
Taking a piece of metal or a plate that has any oily or other non-water-soluble food on it, rinsing it, and chlorinating it results in a mess that might indeed be non-infectious but is otherwise disgusting. Also, leaving a piece of stainless steel covered in chloride (which that bleach will turn into) is one of the worst things you could credibly do to it in a kitchen context. (And, while the relevant regulators don’t seem to care about disinfection byproducts in a kitchen, all those residual organics that didn’t get removed plus hypochlorous acid seem like they would thoroughly fail most drinking water standards.)
Also, I don’t know what all the food safety and dishwasher vendors are telling their customers, but that nice residual chlorine has a tasty and odor that is not appetizing at all. But you can also legally disinfect your dishes and such with sufficiently hot water, and you can buy a commercial dishwasher that does that instead of using chlorine.
In a home context, what’s wrong with dish soap and a sponge or brush? In a commercial kitchen that really wants to be compliant could use dish soap followed by a (very) hot rinse. The average household instant hot water tap is plenty hot for this, too, although demonstrably hitting those HACCP targets might be tricky.
I'm not disputing that, and it's kind of my point. Most home cooks (I would bet millions) are not worrying about "the cutting experience" when they are making dinner. They are using a knife to cut up vegetables or slice meat or whatever. Then they are putting that knife in the dishwasher. Not all of them, but most.
I think my other points matter more. I think people who are invested in the experience as you suggest care about more than just the edge and finish, they care about the weight and balance and feel as well. I think this knife is probably worse on those qualities.
I don't mean to say this knife sucks or that this guy is dumb. It's a cool knife, and he's clearly not dumb. I just think this is more a passion project curiosity kind of thing than a useful product addressing a large market need. Maybe a future mass market version (cheaper steel, stamped, more contoured handle) would change my mind.
> Most home cooks (I would bet millions) are not worrying about "the cutting experience"
Indeed, and they won't buy the knife at this price anyway. My point is that not being dishwasher-safe does not matter for ~everyone. If they care, they won't do it; if they don't, they won't buy it.
Yeah the handle was the first thing I saw here that gave me pause. The handle shape matters a lot!
Though: do. not. put. your. $300. knife. in. the. dishwasher.
I felt the collective cringe from everyone reading that comment :).
For those of us who aren't knowledgeable in this field, what happens if you do?
It's hard to do irreparable damage to the steel of a knife. It's just an inert lump of metal. But you could fuck up the handle. Theoretically, the detergent could dull your edge. If you don't isolate your knife and it rattles around, that'll definitely dull it. Mostly: it should only take a couple seconds to clean off your knife in the sink.
> It's hard to do irreparable damage to the steel of a knife.
It’s easy — just heat it above the tempering temperature of the steel in question. You can achieve this in an ordinary oven for most steels, and you can also achieve it (locally) with a motorized sharpener that isn’t cooled. Don’t take a knife you care about to be professionally sharpened by a person who uses a non-water-cooled power tool.
> It's hard to do irreparable damage to the steel of a knife.
Sadly not impossible, I've 'lost' (they're still in the back of a drawer) two good knives to idiots attempting to pry apart frozen chops and steaks .. each case snapped a good inch from the tip.
Not damage from a dishwasher and not damage the edge I realize, but worth mention as a tale of caution.
The steel used to make the knives is not always stainless, so it can stain or rust. Even stainless is really just stain resistant.
Dishwasher detergent is caustic and corrosive to steel, so over time it can pit the metal and dull the finish. Handles will swell and become loose or deteriorate, either because of wood repeatedly being waterlogged and dried or just from the heat cycling. A loose handle can be unsanitary, unsightly, dangerous, or all three.
You'll often read that knives in the dishwasher will bang around and that will damage the edge. And that it's more likely you will hurt yourself pulling a knife out of the dishwasher vs. cleaning them properly.
Phosphoric acid detergents will pit your blade. If the knife is not a stainless steel, the wash and dry cycle will cause accelerated rusting. In wooden-handled knives with a rat tail tang construction, you can start destroying the handle from the inside out due to gaps in the construction allowing water seepage and degradation. In non-stainless knives, that same construction becomes the point where rust tends to build up.
Then you also have the action of the dishwasher water jets bouncing the knife around, dulling and destroying the edge.
Only the shittiest cheapest plastic-handled knives I own touch the dishwasher. Everything else gets cleaned and wiped by hand and put straight to the knife block or its respective scabbard.
I shared this with my tech friends:
“This has all the hallmarks of a product that’s going to be disappointing but I’m so optimistic it won’t be.”
I’m seriously hopefuls it works because vibroblades (I mean, “progressive knives” and “high frequency blade”) are awesome and the timelines of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Metal Gear are getting closer. Which may, or may not be a good thing.
Well we know this tech works because there are already ultrasonic cutters in medical and industrial equipment. So it’s more about whether they implemented it well, rather than some new fundamental discovery.
And for home use: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FK9SB5KR
HOZO NeoBlade Wireless Ultrasonic Cutter
I got a wired (usb-c) ultrasonic cutter for around $100 (not this one), and it's amazing for cutting precise holes on electronic project boxes (plastic / abs).
Is it realistic to have enough power in such a small form factor for this effect?
Yes think of it as a more powerful electric toothbrush. There are actually already toothbrush sized ultrasonic knives you can buy online. This just applies the same tech to what largely looks like a normal chefs knife.
Feel free to correct me if I’m off base, but it doesn’t seem like the robot is actually slicing. Looks more like it’s just mashing the blade into the tomato. In this case I can see how the vibration can make up for the lack of slicing action. Ie sliding the blade across the tomato.
My question is: would there still be an improvement if they used a slicing action?
The difference in sharpness remains if there's no slicing motion with either knive/setting, right?
The nerdy sales pitch got me excited about a knife. Also, I have to wonder if the name is a deliberate nod to the Seattle Supersonics...
I was surprised by that too. The Shun did surprisingly well in the real world test despite lower scores on the other two categories.
A slight tangent but I find sharpness tests often don’t represent the experience at the macro level, but it’s easily benchmarked and quantified.
As an example are tons of people pushing Feather or Astra or similar ultra sharp shaving razors. I bought a ton of sample packs the ones I liked the most were Kai, which are considered relatively dull, but have properties which make the overall experience better (I recall reading they’re thicker and vibrate less during cutting).
To me that makes this knife cutting benchmark more attractive than sharpness or retention, but I still have questions about technique used in the benchmarks, and how that affects knife performance (e.g. I would never try to cut bread by just pressing down as this move does).
One obvious question is where on that list the product in question would fall.
I don’t understand judging a knife by any measure of “sharpness”? Sharpness is what the sharpener brings to the knife. Edge retention is the steel, but the skills of the sharpener (against how easy the steel is to sharpen) are what defines the edge sharpness.
This is mostly just a remark on the fact that BESS is probably just measuring the factory edge… which only matters until it has dulled the first time?
That... seems wrong? It leaves out edge geometry and carbide size?
Edge geometry only matters after the initial cut. BESS measures how much force it takes for the knife to cut a calibrated thread.
Carbide size maybe? But mostly I think it changes toothiness (so slicing, not push cutting). Also, I think that affects how hard or easy it is to get a given edge, but not how good the edge (as measured by BESS) can actually be.
Maybe it changed since you posted it, but right now the top 3 knives there by "Food Cutting Rank" are Japanese (Shun, Moritaka, Tojiro), with a Wuesthof coming in at 4th?
All of the Japanese brands I recognized were in the top 10 (out of 21) with the MAC being exactly in the middle.
I also noticed that while they show the traditional knives struggling to make their way through something hard like a carrot, they never show the ultrasonic knife cutting a carrot. I suspect the ultrasonic feature helps more on softer things.
"nobody uses a chef's knife to cut."
Hi, originally-trained Oriental cook here. Yes, we do use chefs knives to cut cheese. Also cleavers. Also wires.
Ginsu confused us about use cases.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wzULnlHr8w&t=25s
I can see why one would use a serrated knife to cut bread, but what knife would one use to cut cheese other than a chef's knife?
Jacques Pépin suggested at [0] "basically you need three knives":
Of those, other than the chopping/chef's knife, I imagine that one could generally slice cheese with the utility knife (depending on the cheese, of course).[0] https://youtu.be/nffGuGwCE3E?t=12
> That being said, I probably have 300 knifes in my home
Don't forget the follow up
Ironically, the cheeses I would cut with a chef's knife are exactly the ones that aren't going to stick to the knife. The ones that get messy are just as easy to cut with a butter knife.
(Amusingly, butter is one of the demos in this video.)
A Santoku or other knife with scalloped sides do well. There are also in fact, cheese knifes, for cutting and serving that are popular for self service cheese boards. Wire is also popular for cutting large block cheeses.
There are cheese knives that are either very high aspect or have a holes so nothing will stick.
A cheese knife.
The problems were even bigger than that - they tested factory sharpness and factory geometry that often are shit. And not thinning and sharpening them properly. Let alone that the steel on the factory edge has high chance to fatigued/softer than the rest.
Nobody uses a chef's knife to cut cheese?
Ahh, but now they could. No need for specialized cheese-cutting tools with this knife, presumably.
Ditto for bread knives.
Hm, I never understood the need for serrated bread knives. They make a mess and my chef's knife cuts bread just fine?
I believe the thinking is serrated knives work best for things where the skin is tough, but the internal structure is weak. So crusty bread with a lot of air inside.
Also, surprisingly, tomatoes. Lots of people suggest small serrated knives (if you have them) for tomatoes.
The lower the better on the Food Cutting Rank
Yes, I get how the scale works, just not why I should take that scale more seriously than sharpness x edge retention.
My question for this product is entirely different: It's well-known that ultrasonic sound can still damage your hearing despite being inaudible or nearly so. Does this?
I personally watched Scott spend years working on the project and obsessively iterating on the steel, the vibration pattern, the circuitry, the handle, and the form factor. Scott is a hacker, one of us for sure. I mean, the guy built a custom robot just to measure cutting efficiency...
The knife is amazing and exactly as shown in the video. Rand Fishkin has a nice short on LinkedIn trying out the knife too. I think he shows one his (sharp) kitchen knives slicing through a lemon, then the Ultrasonic. It's astounding.
Disclaimer: I am a (tiny) angel investor in Seattle Ultrasonics.
Does that video show him doing actual prep? I 100% believe he made a knife that can make a paper-thin slice of a lemon. But that's not what a chef's knife is for. As someone who thinks the world would be a better place if this product worked and was successful: for god's sake record someone processing an onion. That's what matters.
In Rand's video he does an "old" lime, mozzarella, and a shallot. It's just a quick vid he did in like five minutes but it shows some prep. Rand is a prolific amateur chef...
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7374472...
Disclaimer: I've enjoyed many delicious meals at Rand's table
So, I just watched this, and he's not processing a shallot, he's just slowly talking thin slices off it. Also: even when my MAC is rolled over and needs a hone, it still does a lime just as well.
I'm not saying this knife doesn't work just that I'm noticing that none of the videos show it working.
Seriously, it is only a little bit of an exaggeration to say that the entire job of a chef's knife is to quickly process an onion. What's especially weird is that even an inert knife with its factory edge will show well in an onion dice video!
If thats the actual best demonstration thats not good at all. Like either he is the worst cook ever or the knife is actually difficult to go down straight with..
Im sorry but the video feels a bit disingenuous with the way he is cutting the lime. With the normal knive he just pushes straight down on the lime and with the vibroknife he actually does a slicing move. Same with the cheese. It doesnt feel like an honest comparison
Maybe, though I'll note that this matches how I use regular knives with cheese & similar things: with a dull unscalloped knife I have to carefully go straight down to avoid tearing. If my knife is sharp (or temporarily oiled) and the food doesn't stick, I'll slice. Because I can. The end result is different: thinner slices, less crushing. Also faster.
I saw the same thing immediately. The robot arm could be calibrated to use a real slicing motion as well. They're misrepresenting the actual performance of this product.
100% confirmed meme product.
Free idea: put this tech in a mandoline slicer.
Even the best tend to struggle with consistency and can only go so thin due to all the friction. An ultrasonic mandoline that can overcome all that would probably fly off the shelves and better match the original industrial intent.
On one hand I would buy that instantly. On the other hand, it’s already missing small pieces thanks to my current mandolin. Not sure I want to make my scariest utensil scarier.
I took a few mm off my pinky with one without noticing until I saw blood in my prep dish. They are to be respected.
Had to read that twice. I feel you! It's been nearly 20 years and I can still see the scar.
> An ultrasonic mandoline that can overcome all that would probably make fingers fly off the shelves and better match the original industrial intent.
FTFY
Do you know if the knife still acts "sharp" when the physical blade is dull or does it still need regular sharpening like a normal knife?
Rank Fishkin from MOZ? Why is he testing knives on LinkedIn?
I feel like the demo video embodies a lot of startup advice I've seen on HN about product vs team.
This video makes me like Scott and Seattle Ultrasonics. I feel I can trust Scott's expertise. His backstory fits what I imagine I would do if I were obsessed with a project like this. This makes me compelled to learn more and to maybe become a customer? Why? Because I want to see Scott succeed and would feel proud to be a part of that. Even if this knife didn't end up performing to my expectations or if I didn't really need a knife like this, I want to see Scott make more things. He has a very well-proven record of delivering and I would bet he could do it again.
Funny, that! Whatever type of marketing this is, it works on me.
Yeah, I don't know anything about knives and this is definitely not for me, but I will say I think the pitch was a perfect 10/10. I thought I would watch for a few seconds and stayed for the whole thing. Great job.
I'm afraid all it did for me is it made me think to myself (in a sarcastic inner voice): "are you going to do a screwdriver next?".
Maybe I'm just a sci-fi nerd who loves innovation, but this is so cool!
Clearly, this product is not intended for the mass market, and may find purchase with people who have tennis elbow and who can afford it, etc. <insert other critiques about practicality and applicability here>. But still, when was the last time someone tried to re-invent something as basic as a knife?
Ultrasonic knives are used commercially, this is an attempt at a mass market by making it cheaper and packaging it in a more familiar form.
They also make one for home use: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FK9SB5KR
HOZO NeoBlade Wireless Ultrasonic Cutter
It's from a kickstarter.
> when was the last time someone tried to re-invent something as basic as a knife?
A year ago? This one is designed for woodworkers.
https://www.bourbonmoth.com/shop/p/the-bourbon-blade-origina...
I thought I recognised the name - Bourbon Moth is the guy who faked a video of oily rags self-igniting to make a video to advertise fireproof bins for woodworking.
This one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gqi2cNCKQY
Debunking: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtU3bYyCtA
It's interesting that AvE devoted multiple videos to debunking oily rags but believes 9/11 was an inside job.
Expertise & ignorance alike don’t carry across domains.
Writer Jack London's mansion,The Wolf House, that he was building up in Sonoma county was destroyed by a fire that investigators later attributed to the spontaneous combustion of oil-soaked rags in the dining room...
AvE experienced mental breakdown around Canadian trucker anti-lockdown movement. Never been the same since.
> but believes 9/11 was an inside job
Uh, really? I haven't been following him for a while, so I don't absolutely know if you're wrong, but I absolutely can see him joking about it and maybe even taking it too far.
Never heard of either of these Youtubers but I've seen tons of cans of stains and such with warnings about potential self-ignition if left on rags in the wrong conditions...
Yes. Learn from my mistake--I almost burned down my apartment by leaving linseed oil rags unattended.
A pocket chisel is very much not the same thing as a kitchen knife.
Me, immediately: ooh Star Wars vibroblade!
40K chainswords next.
knife is already perfect
Why is it people here seem so unusually sceptical?
It's expensive (but not really, only compared to knives - a $500 GPU isn't expensive). It's probably mostly good in certain niches and using a $10 knife that's sharpened properly is probably 95% as good in almost every application, and using a $10 knife that is only reasonably well sharpened is probably 90% as good. Slicing stuff for hotpot or yakiniku or Korean BBQ is what I thought of when I saw the ad, while for a lot of things it's probably not worth it. But a lot of stuff is like that - good in a niche, OK elsewhere, and there's always a cheaper option that's more flexible and almost as good even in the niche.
I feel like hn is upset by the lack of marketing. This looks like a direct sales ad that you'd get on Facebook, rather than the hype research marketing that mostly targets the b2b types who mostly dwell here? The marketing isn't the kind of marketing they normally get targeted by, so they notice it's marketing?
I notice this on other forums. If marketing isn't slick and well targeted, people get upset and suspicious because it's marketing. But functionally, they're not upset because it's marketing (almost everything is), they're upset because it's not enough marketing, and functionally they want more marketing that targets them better.
I think it's because it seems like a Juicero to anyone who uses knives to make dinner regularly. We're fascinated by tech, and sure, I'd try this, but I bet anyone who has prepped with a knife for hours per week is probably pretty skeptical on the practicality here.
A sharpened piece of metal has been reliable for thousands of years and will continue to remain so. For new tech, I am also a fan of the ceramic knives out there for vegetables, as they hold a razors edge much longer than metal (albeit are far more brittle - I use them for veggies only, no meat).
One can buy a decent steel chef's knife, a ceramic one, lose them both, buy them again, buy a sharpening stone and a strop for the price of one of these. On one hand, the sci-fi emergence of the vibroblade or something in the kitchen would be cool. On the other, it could be a $500 vibrating slapchop[1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxGn2Egekic
"You gonna have an exciting life now. Breakfast to go. You're gonna love my nuts".
O.o
> It's expensive (but not really, only compared to knives - a $500 GPU isn't expensive).
No, it's really expensive. $400 is nearly a week's pay for an hourly worker in much of the US. For many on this site it might be less than a day's labor but that's not the general case.
The lack of trust is probably because knives seem to be a favorite product of shysters. Selling expensive knives that promise the moon and wow the audience with cool knife tricks just reeks of fast talking late-night infomercial salesman trying to get over on grandma. The tech looks cool, but the presentation is off-putting.
You're not thinking like a marketing executive. The people who make $400 a week are not the target audience for this product. It's that simple. Not everything is made for Walmart shoppers.
It's the lack of pragmatism.
"Sure, people claim the kitchen knife has been a solved problem for hundreds of years, but what if there was a kitchen knife that had a battery inside and cost $500?"
And if this version of the knife doesn't connect to the cloud, the next one will.
It all seems quite gimmicky.
That's cynicism.
Everything has pros and cons. You haven't said a single pro. You haven't added any real cons to what I said, and made up hypothetical ones.
It's a sales pitch so you're saying why you wouldn't buy it. I'm not ordering one either, 500 is a bit steep for me. If he just showed off the technology, I suspect people here would be more enthusiastic about it, even if you wouldn't bother to buy it yourself.
I'm not saying you're wrong (at the price point), but that the framing of whether we're going to buy it is a result of the marketing.
> if this version of the knife doesn't connect to the cloud, the next one will.
That's just ugly cynicism. And I'm willing to bet a good amount of money the "next one" from this company won't. But it doesn't matter because this one doesn't and we're talking about this one, not some hypothetical that may never arrive.
If the rechargeable vibrator-knife becomes a fixture of kitchens around the world, it will prove the accusation of 'cynicism'. Until then, whether it's cynicism or sobriety is a matter of opinion.
Kudos if they develop a knife that blunts itself when your subscription expires.
I wrote in another comment that I think this pitch is a 10/10, but I think I understand the skepticism.
There's something about this sort of product that feels inherently gimmicky. I can't quite explain why, maybe because it's too good to be true, maybe because it's a kitchen appliance, maybe it has something to do with the vibrations.
For instance, my girlfriend has this eye cream applicator(?) that vibrates... for some reason. Is it a gimmick? I don't really know, but there isn't a research paper in the world that would convince me it isn't.
Anyways, this video had me hooked, and I would 100% try this out if I could. But I would never buy it without trying first.
I think it’s a really cool product. I would happily own one. The problem I have with it is that $400 is a LOT for a chef knife. A great knife and an awesome sharpener can be easily had for $150, or $250 if you get a top of the line sharpener. That knife will last you a lifetime. How long will this knife last? What happens when the battery runs out of lifespan. What about when the motor dies? If this was closer to $250, I’d be much more likely to buy it.
>> I notice this on other forums. If marketing isn't slick and well targeted, people get upset and suspicious because it's marketing.
For me, I get extra upset and suspicious if marketing is well targeted. Add a plus one if it is particularly slick.
Just something off-putting in someone trying to draw on my strings, which I see all too well myself, thank you.
> using a $10 knife that is only reasonably well sharpened is probably 90% as good
I think the value proposition is in the idea that you don't have to sharpen this knife as often as with a normal knife, and that the performance is consistent.
The non stickiness is also a huge value proposition, because that is an annoying and time consuming aspect of any cutting.
$500 isn’t even out of the question for a great knife, it feels like about the right price point for the product.
It has nothing to do with how good the marketing is especially when the product is so obviously only applicable for niche use.
I think we all had very similar thoughts to yours, but just came to the opposite conclusion.
We are usually skeptical. And I don't know why a weird ad for a smart-knife has gotten to the top-page of HN.
We don't like "buzz" and "hype"... if it's truly a great technology we can buy one a year from now. Not trusting a commercial to be honest isn't undue skepticism.
Well said.
Honest question, does it aerosolize pathogens that cause food-borne illness?
Interesting question, short answer - almost certainly not any more or less than you are already, and to the degree it does, it almost certainly is making things better and not worse.
First - ~all food illness causing bacteria is denser than air. about 1000x denser. On its own, it won't float.
Second - almost all cutting motions are still going to throw it around. So you are already doing this when you cut or chop food. You are slicing cell walls, etc, releasing pathogens that exist inside. But it doesn't like aerosolize in the sense of floating around, because it's denser than air[1]. How far it goes depends on the cutting motion, etc.
Third - does ultrasonic make it better or worse - well, again, it doesn't overall float, so it's really a question of does it do anything to make go farther/less far, and does it do anything to destroy or the opposite?
44khz (used here) is a common ultrasonic frequency in cleaning[2] and leak detection.
In fact, it's also used to remove bacterial cells from surfaces at higher intensities (and detect them at lower intensities). It's actually one of the major ways non-heat pasteurization is done.
While it's not 100% at removing individual bacterial cells, even at super high intensity, ultrasonic frequencies are both detrimental to cell growth, and as used here, will cause lots and lots of bacterial death because of everything from cavitation to pressure changes to instantaneous heat to you name it.
Does it fling pathogens any further? Maybe? I'm sure there are some situations in which it will. But they don't seem normal. Like if you are just slicing raw meat or chicken, it's hard to see how it could do that.
Overall, it probably helps more than it hurts. As far as i can tell, it's not even a close question.
[1] It is possible to get the bacteria to float in air anyway due to brownian motion and other mechanisms, but it still seems overblown - the percent of food borne illness caused by inhaling bacteria vs eating underprepared food it is so small they don't even bother to track it. This knife is not going to change that.
[2] If you google it, you will also discover it's emitted by fearful rats. I don't know if the knife also scares rats away.
I think the parent is specifically referencing the point towards the end of the video where he shows smoke-like vapor coming off the food. It's not clear from your response if you are aware of that, so just wanted to clarify.
To me, it seems like you wrote a lot but never actually answered the question of the person you are responding to. A reminder: the question was does the blade aerosolize fluids. Based on the video (as soon as 10 seconds in) it sure looks like the answer is yes, to a much greater degree than a normal knife.
Errr, what?
First, you are not actually correct on the question.
Here, let me quote the question:
"Honest question, does it aerosolize pathogens that cause food-borne illness?"
That is literally not "does it aerosolize fluids", which is what you claim the question is.
My first sentence: "Interesting question, short answer - almost certainly not any more or less than you are already, and to the degree it does, it almost certainly is making things better and not worse"
How is that not a literal answer?
Again, the question was about aerosolizing pathogens that cause foodborne illness, not just random fluids. So i explained why ultrasonic knives are not going to do that more than normal knife would, and assuming we only care about pathogens cause foodborne illness, will do so much less.
Sure, it can aerosolize lime juice. Lime juice is not a pathogen that causes food borne illness?
If your answer is atually meant to claim it aerosolizes pathogens much more than a normal knife, please cite data or studies or some other form of science. I can give you citations to literally every claim i made. I wrote most of the science reasons. The video does not show anything related to pathogens.
Otherwise, i think it is you who is not answering the question asked, which was not about fluids?
That's good point, aerosolized raw chicken meat water doesn't sound like a good time.
> That's good point
Why is it a good point?
Do you get disease at a rate we care about from smelling a fart? Or smelling raw chicken? Or cooking chicken and the aerosolize particles off that?
The tool seems to melt going off similar tech - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNwHDWlA7gE
Why does you brain think it's a good point other than you want to be negative? Because nihilism is cooler than thinking?
Dentists do ultrasonic scaling, which a ultrasonic water spray and are not dropping like flies.
What is the good point here, tell us more, love to hear it.
Dentists did avoid aerosolising procedures when COVID protections were in place, along with upgrading to FFP3 masks and full face visors.
> Dentists do ultrasonic scaling, which a ultrasonic water spray and are not dropping like flies.
Dentists wear masks, and the human mouth doesn't tend to contain Salmonella
Good news - ~all food borne pathogens are much denser than air. Not like slightly, about 1000x denser.
You are going to have about as much aerosolized raw chicken meat water (ARCMW) whether you use an ultrasonic knife or not.
The ARCMW touched by the ultrasonic knife will probably have significantly less alive bacteria than the stuff touched by the regular knife.
Great question. It does seem like you would not want to use it for raw chicken.
As far as i can know, the science does not support this answer :) In fact, it is probably the opposite - you should definitely use it on raw chicken.
So it is essentially an electric tomato knife.
To be fair, plants are where you really need a sharp knife. There's a reason why they do these tests with tomatoes.
A good quality well sharpened knife already works incredibly well, doesn't cost $500, doesn't need to be recharged, and isn't going to be e-waste in 5 years (when the battery fails).
It's a cool idea, and I hope it is commercially successful, but not for me.
This thing is $399, which is on the expensive side of prestige chef knives, but by no means the extravagant side of it. People who buy knives that cost more than $150 generally buy lots of knives, and this is priced for that market.
But it's not priced for the market of people who buy lots of knives. Because those who buy lots of knives aren't going to be interested in some mediocre knife with a vibration motor attached to it.
Those who are interested in knives would be able to get a more impressive knife for $399. And they are usually the type of people that enjoy sharpening a knife until it cuts better than this ultrasonic knife ever will.
This is a product which is targeted at people who don't really know a lot about knives and prep their meals with a dull blade.
Yeah I mean, the product is either going to work or it isn't going to work. But the only people who are going to be early adopters for this are knife nerds. Obviously, you'll get a knife that r/chefknives admires for cheaper than that!
I'm not hyping the product. I keep a knife set up to easily slice tomatoes, and if I don't want to clean it carefully afterwards I just use a good thin serrated bread knife. I'm still not really sure what this knife is "for". But I'm also not ruling out that it is "for" something interesting.
Why do you think the knife is mediocre?
The knife itself is made out of AUS-10, which is a very mediocre steel. It's not bad per-se, but when you're spending $400 on a knife, you typically expect premium steels to be used. Additionally, most knives in that price range typically have some sort of flair to them to make them visually appealing: Damascus patterning, nice wooden handles, etc.
I know the handle itself is integral to the ultrasonic function, but it reminds me of a cheap kitchen thermometer.
For comparison, 'analog' knives are much nicer looking for sometimes far cheaper.
Here's a $309 knife by Miyabi (which is owned by Zwilling): https://cutleryandmore.com/products/miyabi-birchwood-chefs-k...
You can even find down-market knives by the same company that have the similar steel with different finishing:
https://cutleryandmore.com/products/miyabi-mizu-sg2-chefs-kn...
https://cutleryandmore.com/products/miyabi-kaizen-ii-chefs-k...
https://cutleryandmore.com/products/miyabi-evolution-chefs-k...
AUS-10 is basically 440C, and is an excellent steel for cutlery (and was once considered at the very high end of stainless steels). Very stainless, reasonably tough, and honorable slicing edge retention if heat treated to a relatively high hardness (60-61HRC would be on the mark). It will sharpen OK, but may have a bit of a gummy feel on the stones and not be as easy as carbon/low alloy steels.
Again, it’s not that it’s bad per-se, it’s that it is easily outclassed by numerous other more modern steels. It’s cheap compared to more exotic stuff, and feels almost insulting at the price you’re paying for the knife.
If the knife we’re discussing was sub $100 I’d have no issue with AUS-10/440C, but we’re talking about a $400 knife.
So what steel do you feel is appropriate for a $400 knife?
Some steels might work better with ultrasonics than others.
I would like to see a ceramic version.
Presumably if you want something that resists chipping due to the high forces of the ultrasonic, so you'd pick something with quite high toughness and moderate edge retention. Maybe something like CPM-CruWear? If you prefer something with higher corrosion-resistant properties, MagnaCut?
Those are just two examples of premium steels that would be superior to AUS-10 in every way. Additionally, as I already mentioned, you'd expect a knife that is $400 to be beautiful too. It really feels like the design element was left out of this knife. I'm sure the handle has many practical elements, but there has to be something that could be done to make it look more visually appealing.
This is a $100 knife with a $300 ultrasonic vibrator mounted to it.
It’s $499 with the wireless charger. I see that the charger isn’t required. You can take the battery out of the knife and charge it by USB. I would correct my comment, but it is no longer possible for me to edit it.
That's quite the expensive charger. Makes me wonder what other parts of the knives are overpriced that much.
The battery is comes out for recharging, so replacing a dead battery should be trivial
It's a proprietary form factor, so you're gambling on replacements being available down the line. I don't think it'll be easy to rebuild the battery pack without compromising the casing.
Given the battery specs and the form factor of the products, they could have used a 14500 cell that retails for $5. That's not as much recurring revenue as charging $80 for something proprietary though.
3d printer and couple of cells and I guess a board will get the job done.
You will have to print it from something like polyamide or polycarbonate, definitely not PLA
Or chuck it out as e-waste and buy the shiny new one
The dead battery is still e-waste and recycling isn't a magically neutral activity that brings back one new product out of an old one with no loss or energy spent.
We made it! We’ve finally invented vibroblades!
I was searching for this comment. All the snark in this thread, I’m just excited that we’ve invented working vibroblades lol
the next version will come with plasma micro jets ejection from the cutting edge - convenient for civilian use. I'm also wandering about an array of shaped micro-charges on the edge - should be able to cut through several millimeters of steel in one move, etc. so a soldier can cut though an opponent's ballistic vest or a into an lightly armored IFV.
A shaped charge is sadly the opposite of sharp so it would be a one time use blade that would be dull before and after
That one use would be anything but dull though
You can have it sharp with shaped charges array sitting a bit deeper and sideways, and new edge breaking out as side effect of shaped charges exploding, rinse and repeat, about 5 times for a regularly sized sword.
Even more interesting alternative is to have some quick blade switching machinery to switch on-the-fly between the actual blade edge and the shaped charge array and to add some feeding machinery of shaped charges into the array (and to have some stretch-shaped charges instead of the rounded ones)
I guess the easy mode would be to make one edge shaped charges and one edge... edge
Heinlein, Star Frontiers, Star Wars, Battletech, 40k, Rifts, GURPs, Gundam, Metal Gear, Guyver, Shadowrun, and Evangelion will all be pleased.
Time until vibroswords, vibroaxes, vorpal blades, ect...
Now if they could get the vibrations by shooting a bullet along the edge, we'd also have gunblades!
Hard to watch the tiny video. Cannot be made full screen. Rotating phone sideways the website header obscures the video.
edit: https://youtu.be/cXjbSVt9XNM
> Cannot be made full screen
Wha? I tapped the little diagonal expandy-arrows in the top corner and it went full screen.
No such button on my screen. Android v14, Firefox.
Even worse on Firefox/Windows: play button doesn't activate when clicked
I hate that default click action is mute and that the cursor is replaced with speaker.
I actually thought that was a neat touch, since that's one of my most frequent interactions with an online video. But it needs to be overridden when the pointer is over the other controls. I couldn't scrub through the video on desktop without repeatedly muting/unmuting.
I think if this can keep a knife effectively sharper than the equivalent nice steel with less maintenance, then it’s going to find a market.
I’m a nerd, but Ive found that once I’ve mastered a hobby I eventually gravitate towards convenience, optimizing my time over absolute performance. I’ve built five PCs in my life, and now I only own a macbook. I spent loads of time optimizing my hifi setup, and now most of my apartment is sonos. And I have probably 1k worth of nice japanese knives + whetstones, that I would happily replace with a single knife that needs little to no upkeep.
I am like you, but my concern with this knife is lifespan. My Japanese knives will last a lifetime. This knife has no warranty that I could find, but how long do we expect it to live? If it’s 10 years or so, I could be happy with it.
While I think this is neat, I doubt the added complexity of the device, extra space required for storage of charger and the chore of charging it are worth the benefit of a slightly better, easier slice. Might be nice for people with certain disabilities though.
How much do you actually cook though? As a former professional chef I still do a lot of cooking and I’d love one of these and any storage trade off looks absolutely worth while.
A lot of the cool stuff we have now started off for accessibility.
If it works at least as well as the current electric knives, it let's you cut things you'd usually not try to cut.
Thin slicing frozen meat for instance, carving pumpkins, cutting bones etc.
I think it would be fine as u would need a lot less knives so one bespoke one with a charger wouldn’t be that big of a deal
Doesn't bespoke mean one of a kind and/or custom made for a specific purpose? I don't think this is bespoke. It's a gimmick.
The only actual benefit I find it has over a well-maintained sharp chef knife is the non-stick aspect, which looks really nice but not $300 nice IMO.
Most people don't sharpen their knives enough and therefore they have to expend a lot of effort to sharpen them.
If your knife is only slightly dull it takes 10 seconds to resharpen it, unlike if you've gotten the edge all folded over and such.
But as you say, most people don’t do that. So “the only actual benefit” is something of value to most people.
This is the best demo video ever! Congrats on reinventing the knife!
Yeah, have to say the video is pretty good. I came in expecting the typical shopping channel pitch, but it did a very good job explaining the things the knife can and can't do. It really helps that it's presented by the inventor himself.
Still won't buy one but still.
Have you watched any Cold Steel videos?
This is a QVC product with the name of a US tech city slapped on it.
Signed, a guy living nearby the home of QVC in a decidedly non-tech area of the US.
Ps. don’t buy future e-waste kitchen ware unless you have accessibility reasons. You can get a good-enough victoronix 8” chef knife for $65 (I paid $36 a long time ago) and a world class chef knife for less than $250.
This is nonsense and your cynicism is unwarranted. I personally know Scott. He's worked on food tech in Seattle for decades, and developed the product and fundraised for Seattle Ultrasonics locally.
Ultrasonic knives are historically large footprint devices used in commercial/industrial food prep. The innovation here is making ultrasonic hardware compact enough to fit in the knife handle.
Sadly Howard Schultz moved the Ultrasonics to Oklahoma City a while back.
"The innovation here is making ultrasonic hardware compact enough to fit in the knife handle."
I was using ultrasonic scalpels back in 2002. They were smaller than this knife.
Were they standalone devices, or was the ultrasonic hardware in a separate enclosure connected by a cord?
Standalone but bulky, about as thick as a dry erase marker.
Say more? I'd love to see a takedown of this, but this isn't one. QVC does not appear to sell this product, nor would its performance differ whether or not QVC did.
QVC might not be a well written takedown of it, but he’s right that you don’t need an electronic knife.
My first job was at a knife shop so I’ve seen everything from stamped steel fantasy nonsense to traditional style hand forged items. There’s a lot that goes into making a good knife and you don’t need to spend a lot to get one. Similarly you can spend a lot of money for marginal to no benefit.
In general a hard edge with a softer back is necessary for a strong knife that will cut well. This is a function of heat treatment. A knife that is tempered the same the whole blade is fine for smaller knives but it’s possible to break the tips or edges off larger knives. From there metallurgy affects the edge retention and how easy it is to sharpen. Plain 440C will make a fine enough knife if heat treated properly but can also make blades that can’t be made particularly sharp and can’t easily be sharpened. These knives will be very stainless so this is why poor quality and good quality knives will be made in 440C. The next tier of knives beyond singular steel forging will be a very hard edge steel wrapped around a softer core steel. The sky is the limit from there in terms of metallurgy. The highest end knives will use powdered steel where precisely composed steel bars are made using uniform grains of steel and other attractive metals and doping materials as part of the forging process.
Once it gets home a good edge has to be maintained.
People do all sorts of things to dull perfectly good cutlery (I cringe when I see people use glass or marble serving/cheese boards as a cutting board). A off hand toss of a knife into a sink can roll the edge.
The worst offense is when I see someone at a farmers market with the grinding wheel “sharpening” a knife by crudely removing the hardened steel edge of a knife. Good luck cutting much with the softer core steel or softer tempered back steel.
While having an Evangelion style ultrasonic knife is cool, it’s certainly not necessary and I expect it can be ruined in many of the same ways a $400 traditional knife can be.
At home I have Henkels for the holidays and some forged food service knife’s for general use. When visitors throw the food service knives into the sink I just take out the sharpening stones and don’t cry all that much.
Literally everything you've said is about regular knives. You haven't said a thing about ultrasonic knives. So I'm not sure what you're trying to argue?
Knives are already high tech and the GP’s point that you don’t need an ultrasonic knife is valid even if “QVC product” is inaccurate. They’re not just hunks of steel. Sharp knives can be dulled by abuse which something that vibrates will be vulnerable to as well.
This is akin to the already established very expensive powdered steel knives. Do you need this to have a sharp knife? Nope. Is anyone wrong for wanting it? No.
This product isn't about not having to sharpen your knife.
It's about a knife that is ~equivalently sharp to begin with, but slices with less force and less sticking, and can therefore slice things more exactly/easily than otherwise.
Of course you don't need it, but it's fundamentally different from existing knives, which you seem to not be acknowledging. When you say this is akin to "powdered steel knives", no it isn't. Powdered steel is about hardness. Nothing to do with ease of slicing or lack of sticking.
So you're talking about things that have nothing to do with this particular technology.
I’m not taking a negative view on this knife or technology. I believe you’re misunderstanding the intention of my color commentary? “Do not need” is not equivalent to “this is terrible.”
Powdered metallurgy, to parry your point, is not about hardness but about having the most precise composition of a metal. I.e you can have better wearing 440C, better machinable 440C, etc. most of this was intended for manufacturing high end industrial equipment. For kitchen knives it’s unnecessary even if it’s cool. It’s incrementally better but like this product it’s not necessary.
Similarly this isn’t “new technology” aside from the packaging of industrial technology into a chefs knife. You can get X-Acto knife sized versions of this already. Ceramic blades came from industrial alumina production. Cool, not necessary, but nothing wrong if it’s your jam.
The classic “QVC knife” is the Ginsu knife which has a lot of the same claims/qualities from a far. It’s an implementation of pattern welded steel and when you use a microscope you’ll see its thousands of serrated edges. Their ad shows the user cutting a can and then thinly slicing a tomato. Works fine until the edge gets rolled and since it’s cheaply processed steel (lacking the points of good construction I mentioned above), that’s usually what happens. I’d expect the company this whole discussion is about doing a lot better here since they’re not trying to sell a three knife set for $29.95 with free shipping.
My point about things being easily damaged with mishandling is that most people simply don’t handle knives well enough to see a benefit from high end knives, not that they aren’t nice/better/valid/different/etc. All of that can be true and the knife no longer cut because the edge is damaged. A Ferrari is a technologically complex car but not a very good car if the tires are all flat. If this thing doesn’t have an edge it isn’t going to cut well.
This is a point they make on their own site:
> Is the knife dishwasher safe?
> Updated 13 days ago
>
> No, but neither is any sharp knife. Dishwasher detergents contain micro-abrasives that dull and chip away at knife edges. If you enjoy using sharp knives, never put them in the dishwasher!
This is actually a more strict take than I have on edge retention, but I wouldn’t complain if my cutlery were treated this way.
Like I said a few posts up, I have knives that cost several hundred dollars. I keep the cheap ones out so I don’t cry when they get lobbed into a sink with the dirty dishes. When sharp they all cut very well. The expensive ones are better at edge retention and can be made a little sharper. After a friend helps clean or cuts some cheese on the cheese board the knife that was used is dull and not a great tool, be it the $30 food service knife or the $400 Henkels knife. You just can’t cheat physics.
I must be misunderstanding.
I still don't know what you're saying about this knife. All you say is:
> Similarly this isn’t “new technology” aside from the packaging of industrial technology into a chefs knife.
Which, yes that's the new part. That's not a trivial thing. It's a significant engineering achievement that took them years to figure out.
"It's a significant engineering achievement that took them years to figure out."
More likely waited for patent to expire, as the ultrasonic scalpel has been around since at least 2002.
This is a semantic argument. This product smacks of being a garbage kitchen gadget. Whether or not it's a QVC product, it certainly looks like cheap white-label alibaba junk. Just look at that handle. Did they just slap a knifeblade into an electric nosehair trimmer?
I'd try one out of professional/academic curiosity (I'm a chef), but am highly skeptical of this product. It looks like absolute trash.
All the people saying this knife does anything remarkable clearly have no experience in maintaining a decent knife blade. I've got knives that I've had for over 20 years that perform as well as this thing appears to (in the slick prepared advertisement).
Having said all that, you won't find an accurate takedown of a product that isn't on the market yet. Still, I can't help but wonder if the person behind this had dedicated that effort towards helping mitigate the water crisis, deforestation, or any number of other inarguably nobler pursuits.
They actually had an industrial design studio come up with the design. It isn’t white labeled “Alibaba junk” and to my eyes, it doesn’t resemble that either.
> I've got knives that I've had for over 20 years that perform as well as this thing appears to (in the slick prepared advertisement).
You have knives that can not have potatoes stick without scallops in the blade? Or that can atomize lemon drops? Or that can cut through bread easily without a serrated edge? What I’m seeing in the video is a lot more versatile. But I can see needing a smaller utility knife still.
Why on earth would I care if a potato sticks to my blade, and why would I need to atomize lemon juice with my knife?
I worked in some of the best kitchens on the planet and for every hipster with a blue paper #2 carbon steel hand made japanese chefs knife there was an old gray beard with a row of old busted victorinoxes hanging on the wall. Both of these cooks would filet a halibut beautifully.
It isn't the knife.
Because it's annoying af when you're slicing potatoes.
> Or that can cut through bread easily without a serrated edge?
Yes. Absolutely. IME a quality sharpened chefs' knife is far better at cutting bread cleanly than a serrated knife, which by contrast will leave a rough edge and loads of crumbs.
That is not my experience.
If you try to cut through a croissant, the amount of pressure needed will often crush the croissant before slicing through (though it depends on the type of croissant).
Meanwhile, while you can use a chef's knife to cut through a crusty baguette, as it's strong enough not to collapse, you need to apply so much pressure that it's not as safe -- the blade can slip to either side over the hard irregular surface. A serrated knife requires vastly less pressure and is therefore much safer.
Yes a serrated knife can leave a rough edge and crumbs, but that's better than smooshing something entirely or cutting your hand because the knife slipped.
It depends on the bread. Many breads are basically impossible to cut properly with a straight edge knife. They end up disfigured worse than what you’re describing with serrated knives.
Have you ever tried a bread knife with so-called "micro-serrations" (really something like ~0.5mm tooth depth / pitch)?
The one I have seems to cut just as cleanly as a chef's knife once within a material, but has better ability to bite into material at the start of a cut, when a chef's knife would be slipping off. (Think: a freshly-baked loaf of high-sugar bread, where the outside is relatively stiff, but the inside is so soft that the outside tries to "squish away" from a non-serrated slice.)
I would never use it for dicing, but it's oddly goot at e.g. slicing watermelon.
Have you seen this knife do any of these things in action? Will it continue to do so? Nobody has, or will, until this gadget hits the market.
I remain skeptical in spite of your weird defensive reaction. I'm speaking about how a product appears to me as a professional. Not attcking you personally (unless it's your product... then I think you should do something good for society with your time)
> All the people saying this knife does anything remarkable clearly have no experience in maintaining a decent knife blade.
Yes? I mean, that's one of the main points of the gadget, as said in the advertisement.
The blade must be sharpen regardless, the apex won't stay sharp on its right own. The vibration does help but it doesn't do any actual cutting if you dull the blade.
does nobody keep their knives in a pyramid anymore?
Is that what they meant to say? "This looks like a gadget"? Then why did they say "coming from someone living nearby the home of QVC"?
I think basically the whole thread is acknowledging that this looks like a gadget!
Is there video online of any knife cutting off the ends of chives in mid-air?
The guy has a YouTube video where he claims to have spent 6 years working on this product. Is he lying?
Check out Japanese knives. The Tojiro DP I got for an inflation adjusted $75 is a dramatically better knife than that Victorinox.
i've had both, and the reality is that they're both just steel -- a good grind will make any shit steel knife cut like a 700 dollar Japanese blade for a few days.
(and yes the Japanese steel dulls too. No cheating physics.)
One note on high quality and carbon Japanese knives - they are way harder to sharpen, also usually come with 17 degrees apex.
Higher HRC would retain the sharp edge for longer, of course - but again much harder (literally) to sharp them.
Its my understanding of knife sharpening that carbon steel is easier to sharpen then stainless and that softer steels are more difficult then high hrc steel due to burr removal.
VG10 in Tojiro DP is stainless steel, and even stainless goes up to 64+ HRC.
I think a lot of German knives are moving to the same angle now
In the video he says he spent a lot of time making prototypes and perfecting the design.
Is he lying? He shows images of the prototypes. Did he create fake prototypes?
It is only eWaste if you think our future does not resemble the Fallout games.
But if you do this will be excellent tech for melee weapons.
now I want to see ultrasonic fencing
i don't think they slapped seattle on it because of tech connotations.
i think they slapped seattle on it because of the Seattle Supersonics, their old NBA team that still has a cult following
how do you sharpen it?
I use a knock-off of the edgepro I got for $30 online, with a nice set of compatible whetstones that click into the assembly that were $20 online. I did what everyone else does and hotglued some magnets underneath the piece you hold the knife on.
I tried a compatible strop that clicks in but it's not worth it imo; just use a normal strop.
Whetstones, pretty cheap only and not as hard as it seems.
just want to point out that maintaining a knife is a whole hobby that requires a time investment of learning the skill and storage of additional tools and materials. i'm surprised at all the apparent knife enthusiast posts trashing this device. I take my victorinox (which is absolutely nothing special and surprises me that it costs $60+ dollars) to the farmers market for sharpening but sharpness isn't even the problem. Potatoes in particular stick to the blade like a strong magnet and it takes me 5x longer to prep. I enjoy cooking but not chopping endless veggies and i'm hoping this thing can carry some of that weight without looking like i'm using an oversized electric toothbrush.
> just want to point out that maintaining a knife is a whole hobby that requires a time investment of learning the skill and storage of additional tools and material.
You're right that's a hobby. But the hobby's definition of "proper maintenance" and what it "requires" is basically just people nerding out about things that don't matter the slightest in the real world.
To maintain a kitchen knife so that it cuts a tomato without squishing it, you don't need a book on knife science. Further, that nerdery is probably actively harmful, because instead of simple solutions, people are told they need an inspection microscope and a variety of jigs and other implements. So they buy an objectively bad electric sharpener and move on.
Also: use serrated knives for tomatoes. They don't squish.
> just want to point out that maintaining a knife is a whole hobby that requires a time investment of learning the skill and storage of additional tools and materials.
Properly maintaining a knife does. Most people don't need to properly maintain a knife. You can do it good enough with a honing steel and some crappy automatic sharpener.
I enjoy cooking good food for my family and myself, but cooking is not a hobby of mine. So if my knife can slice a tomato without crushing it, then that's good enough for me. I don't need to shave a tomato so thin that the slice is transparent.
Does the crappy automatic sharpener work? Well the knife cuts better after I use it, so yes, it does.
Yes as I mentioned I use often-recommended knives (victorinox, shun) and have them occasionally sharpened professionally and at least in my case the ultrasonic knife appears to solve some very real problems that knife maintenance cannot.
it takes no skill to make a blunt knife sharper. To make a sharp knife sharper, sure, but in a good vast majority of home knife situations, just doing anything with any flat sharpening surface is an improvement.
I can attest to this as I have improved knifes day one of trying despite my lack of any sort of skill
Is 10min per knife every 3-6 months a hobby?
Because that is just general maintenance to me.
If you don't put your good knives in the dishwasher and wash/dry them right after usage, they'll last a long time.
You need one diamond two-sided plate, holder for it, and a stropping leather. All of that can be bought for $60 on Amazon.
This is enough to get your knives to be sharp enough to shave hair.
Time investment is more individual. It took me about 3 hours to get good enough.
Sharpening a knife to r/sharpening standards is hard. But just honing frequently and occasionally using a cheap sharpener will get you further than 95% of home chefs.
I decided it was hard and never got very good at sharpening. Now I've got a Chef's Choice XV and my knives are sharper than they've ever been.
my new favorite kitchen gadget is small deli slicer, $75 on amazon.
minor pain to clean, but MUCH faster than a knife, totally safe (pusher keeps fingers away from the blade) and you get precise thickness cuts every time, which means they cook precisely too.
Especially good for vegetables like potatoes, onion, eggplant, etc.
Is it worth the cleaning hassle? I often avoid using a mandolin or food processor just because cleaning my knife is so much easier.
for firm things its fine, clean the moment the work is done and it shouldn't be much effort, and having nice consistent slices feels good too
For anything other than ideally firm things, the cleanup can be a nightmare
I did this too! I love being able to buy a large chunk of deli meat and slice off what I need at whatever width I want.
Home cook deli slicers are the most slept on, underrated pantry upgrade.
Yes, and a pass with a honing steel every day to maintain the cutting edge between proper whetstones sharpening every few months.
don't use honing steel. at best it doesn't do anything, at worst it damages your knife.
here's a closer look at it with a microscope. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4ReQ83CZOQ
Ceramic honing rod. Works amazingly well and is appropriate for japanese knives.
just a guy abusing his knife to prove he can't fix it using the wrong tool badly
No? The point was to understand what the tool does and when it can help. And he found out that if you have a Burr it can help. But if you have a properly sharpened knife without a Burr it won't do anything to help and will just destroy your edge.
microwaves are useless because they can't toast bread no matter how hard I mash the keypad
do not buy those garbage amazon whetstones. Buy a diamond sharpening 'stone'.
Wet stones are hard. Rolling ones are easy albeit “real” knife aficionados don’t like it.
They're really not. All you need is an angle guide you stick to the knife. Something like https://setamono.co.za/products/knife-sharpening-angle-retai...
With that all you need to do is pretty much go back and forth. Note that the whetstone eventually wears them out too.
Something to grab while you're at it, is a truing stone to take care of the whetstone as it _will_ wear out unevenly making the sharpening a pain.
Thats 2-3 extras over rolling sharpeners
I used to sharpen my straight-knife planer blades, planing irons, chisels, and knives with whetstones / water stones. It was too big of a pain in the ass over time, so I switched to diamond stones.
Biggest advantages is that you don't need to pre-soak them and diamond stones don't develop a valley / have to be flattened.
if you plan on getting into sharpening I would just start with a coarse, fine, and extra fine diamond stone and a leather strop w/ stropping compound.
Same advice - don't use the soaking stones. Nowadays they are plenty of decent quality diamond stones (or ceramic ones)
Whetstones were hard 20 years ago. Right now there is abundance of quality info and products. The community actually figured out idiotproof and effective ways to deburr, to strop, resin bound diamond stones are affordable (or even cheap if you just buy the abrasive from China and go the diy route).
In my case I just wait for the sharpening knife guy who pass once a week in my neighborhood. It is quite easy as I am working from home and he plays those distinctive panpipes notes.
That definitely sounds like Mexico.
This happens in Italy aswell.
and Spain
And China
And India. Although here they do a horrible job of it, so I prefer to sharpen them myself.
Honing is 1,000x more important than sharpening.
When it does come time to sharpen, I constantly see places offering knife sharpening services, and they’re usually cheap enough. Or you could get a gizmo that does a mediocre job (and shaves away far too much material) if you just want to get it done. Or you could learn to do it yourself which isn’t that hard or time-consuming but is somewhat of a labor of love.
What exactly is the difference between honing and sharpening.
Making the edge is sharpening. Removing the ripples in it is honing.
This is the first time I've heard someone say honing is very important, when I was first learning this, I was told that it was the next thing to pseudoscience!
Absolutely not. A blade can stay sharp for a much longer period of time than it can stay honed. The edge of a piece of paper is extremely sharp, but it only cuts you in specific circumstances due to being difficult to maintain a firm edge.
A knife's edge is closer to that than you'd think. At the scales of sharpness of a good knife, it's impossible to keep the edge straight for very long. A honing rod quickly brings these back in line. I hone knives after maybe a week of use; it only takes a few seconds.
And this is a comically easy property to test. Use a "dull" knife then hone it and try again. It will cut drastically better.
AUS-10 steel is fairly easy to sharpen, so stones are a good option but I prefer diamond sharpeners myself.
Carefully? Professionally? Except which knife stall at which farmers market wants the job?
Learning to sharpen the (correct) knife (for the task) will do as much or more for the chef who struggles here.
Prepping 1000 lemons? An ultrasonic knife is not your answer.
umm, you raise a valid concern, afaict, however, e-waste is kind of a taboo word around here, or? Or maybe just another part of the 'inevitable' belief system.
Like, how about that _planned obsolescence_ of a vast majority of consumer electronics hardware? (If that ain't the case, would be happen to learn otherwise from someone with better knowledge.)
I guess with knives the thing is it’s very easy and cheap to get a version that works well lasts pretty much forever. Makes the other options look worse in comparison.
The comments in this thread remind me of the famous HN Dropbox announcement.
To 99% of people, “just sharpen your knife regularly” is about as realistic as “just set up a Linux FTP server with rsync and…”
Target market is a hobby chef nerd’s mom :)
Otoh: this is NOT how a person cuts with a knife! Kills credibility of the whole complicated measurement with the robot. Just ask a chef to cut on a scale. You will be surprised. People can cut with semi-dull knife by pulling the knife towards their body not pushing down towards the cutting surface.
Any new tech arrives as a gimmick, too expensive and underwhelming to be practical in daily life. Think about early TVs with a postcard-size monochrome screen, early 8-bit hobby computers, first Tesla cars, solar panels at the time when only spacecraft carried them, etc.
If the thing proves somehow useful, mass adoption and mass production slashes the cost 2-3 orders of magnitude, and the thing becomes mundane.
Otherwise it becomes forgotten as a weird gimmick.
Let's wait another 15 years.
Pretty kewl, but, for some reason, this old site comes to mind...
https://www.tumblr.com/weputachipinit
why does tumblr make me sign in to see posts
Thanks for the share, hadn't seen that before.
Ultrasonic knives have been available for non-food uses for a long time. They are useful in certain narrow applications, such as cutting leather or some plastics.
That said, they come with two big caveats. First, if you push them into any harder material, the edge is destroyed almost immediately because of the micro-scale "jackhammer" action. So, hit that avocado pit and the knife is probably cooked.
Second, the constant motion heats up the blade, to the point of melting thermoplastics or causing the edge to lose temper if you're pushing a bit too hard, cutting the wrong material, etc.
It's your money, but I suspect this knife is more of a hassle, and requires more care, than a regular kitchen knife. And let's face it, the coolness factor aside, how often do you struggle to cut chicken, tomatoes, or bread? If you do, it's probably because your knife is dull, and this knife will get dull too.
I'm an amateur cook, my immediate question was how much the vibration and heating will affect vegetable and meat oxidation and cell damage on the cut surface.
Could this improve the texture and flavor of certain foods? Like make garlic taste even more garlicky? Or could it cause an apple slice to brown faster? Can it be used to slice cooked fish as if it were sashimi? Etc.
If a site like SeriousEats does a product review I hope they focus on qualitative taste, and possibilities for enhancing cooking techniques, not merely saving time/effort to do something.
Sourdough can actually be a pain to cut without making a giant mess of the crust
Please tell me it was an intentional pun with the word for bread in French: pain.
all the comparisons in the vid show knives being pushed through the food. that's not a good way to use a knife.
if you used a knife to actually slice the tomato instead of chopping it, you'd get a much different force result.
not to say there's no benefit here, but def feels intentionally exaggerated.
also, i wonder how fast this blade will wear if you ever accidentally pressed the edge into the cutting block. my guess is that it will wear much faster.
It depends completely on the knife. A nakiri or a bunka wants you to push cut, for instance.
I definitely did notice that the video didn't show any bulk prep work: a clean cut through a single product is not nearly as interesting to me as how cleanly and quickly I can work through a couple onions.
That’s not necessary with an ultrasonic knife and would generally be a waste of time. The vibrations take the place of needing to slice, rather than chop. This knife is not meant to be used like a normal chef’s knife.
I’d still never get one because I love my knives (and zen out hard when sharpening for an hour or two), but the push is literally the goal here.
> That’s not necessary with an ultrasonic knife and would generally be a waste of time
i was just saying they compare it to normal knives being used incorrectly.
Having worked a fair amount with ultrasound for eye surgery [0] the physics similarities are very striking (the FEA simulation gave me flashbacks) but it's almost funny how the same principles can be translated and applied for an entirely different end purpose (cataract surgery, and slicing tomatoes!)
To use Scott's words it is very cool to see such a tech translation from industry to home use. I would still be cautious about the lifetime of these devices (namely how it will deal with water ingress over time) but the fact that they will come out of a factory is already quite a HW startup feat.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phacoemulsification
It certainly would be nice to have three or four independent reviews from people with knife skills.
If it helps, the inventor worked at other kitchen product companies like Sansaire (founder) and Anova. And at other places in the cooking world. So they’re not entirely unknown either.
No, that doesn't help. Product managers sometimes overhype their products.
Independent. Reviews. People with knife skills. Some degree of communications ability would be nice, too.
The parent comment asked for a second opinion, that's not even related.
It's not made for people with knife skills.
It absolutely is. I’m a former chef and have great knife skills but would love one of these.
What would it do that your current, well-maintained, very sharp knife doesn’t?
Slice thinner and cleaner with less effort. For example the bread slicing ability — I’d love to be able to cut really thin slices of brioche to drape over things or toast. It would also be fun to play with what it might let you do that a regular knife just can’t. I don’t see this as an alternative to a regular knife, but as a different tool that would elevate garnishing.
drop potato slices with less fuss
I’m a decent home cook with decent knife skills and i take my knives to a sharpener from time to time, I have tech job salary, I preordered. Seems neat.
Ok congrats!
Hmm, that seems a bit snarky =(.
I don't think the parent was bragging about the salary thing - a lot of the other comments here are mentioning the price (which to be fair, is definitely in the expensive gadgets/toys bucket...) so he/she (s/g) is saying - he's just a home cook, he's got semi-decent knife skills, and he's in a position that he can afford this.
And let's be honest, tech geeks are basically the target demographic for this sort of thing - as are half the gadgets on Kickstarter. Yes - we can talk all we want about carbon credits, and eWaste, and doing things the old fashioned homestead way when men were men, took cholera and dysentry on the chin, and knew how to use a whetstone, or to whistle (I can do one of those things...)...
I am sorely tempted, and I'm an amateur cook at best...if even that. And truthfully, this probably won't make my food better than a $15 IKEA knife (assuming I just replace those regularly). But it may make the process more enjoyable. And the tech is cool...
I’m sincerely congratulating parent for their purchase. Geez one can’t genuinely just be happy for someone else without a third party hallucinating way too much out of a two-word sentence.
Get a granton or perforated blade instead
Those don’t vibrate like my Japanese animes
I’m a former chef too and have knife skills but, no. Overripe tomatoes, grapes, carrots, meat near cartilage? No problem at all with the right tool.
I want to see what happens when it cuts your finger. Actually, I don't want to see it. But I'm curious.
There are surgical scalpels that are ultrasonic, and they are incredibly sharp when activated. They can cut through skin and tissue like butter!
What happens when the ultrasonic knife gets dull? At what point is a regular sharp knife better?
Most people don't maintain their knives well and they get really ineffective over time. Others who do, probably won't buy this...
You can sharpen it, it's still a regular knife.
This is a boon for elderly losing hand/wrist strength
I work with some bigger ultrasonic cutters/welders and the thing I didn't see in the video was the horrible noise they make. He says the knife makes no noise but they also don't have the noise on for the shots of the bigger ones so I'm suspicious.
Sound is on for the tomato shot in the beginning of the video, FYI. It is extremely quiet.
This kind of thing is what I come to HN for.
This guy did a 6 year multidisciplinary grind to produce a stunning consumer product. Exemplary
It is a cool product, but I have the clumsiness of the average home cook. So my old style knifes are plenty sharp for me. I would not be comfortable using this. But if there were a version with the slipperiness he shows, just having standard sharpness, it would be much more interesting to me.
BTW I think the focus on knife sharpness is overrated for most kitchen tasks. At least for home cooks. Your knives should just have the necessary sharpness. More than that is a negative in my opinion.
I mostly agree that, as someone who cooks something intricate <10 times per year, a sharp knife is in fact more dangerous than a dull one.
Scott in the video makes the argument that sharp knives are safer, because you don't have to use as much force. But the only time I've ever cut myself with a knife in the kitchen have been with very sharp knives, eg one time handling it while washing the blade.
So, some tech business took something that is practical, robust, and low maintenance, and then added a deteriorating battery, delicate electronics, and the need to constantly charge a f-ing kitchen knife. Bullshit innovation is reinventing things, but worse. I wouldn't be surprised if they at some point added AI powered cutting modes and a subscription service, because the target audience clearly is gullible morons that are easily fooled by fancy ideas of vaguely sci-fi concepts.
This is super cool tech and I truly appreciate the grind this guy went through to bring a hardware product to life.
At the same time, I've been using a $5 chef knife for almost a decade and just giving it a few passes against a honing steel every few weeks. It gets plenty sharp after that, to the point where I don't feel I'm missing anything. Then again, I'm just a home cook who's super into kitchen knives so I acknowledge I'm not in the target market.
Cool tool, however: the people who are going to spend $500 on a cook's knife likely already have the capability and motivation to properly sharpen a kitchen knife. The market for this feels extremely limited.
Also: I'd be curious how this feels in the hand due to the button and the extra weight.
To me the main appeal of this is not that it makes cutting easier (you already reduce much of the cutting force needed if you slice across instead of pushing down, which this seems to be doing at a micrometer level) but the fact that food doesn't stick to the blade.
All of my knives have sticking issues, potato slices are the worst culprits. When doing a lot of prep work on veggies in a cramped area it's a pain and this seems like it could actually fix things?
OTOH, I'm not a huge fan of the design, I don't mind spending good money on a knife but between the blade profile and the chonky handle, it looks like an hybrid between an 8" fibrox and an electric turkey cutter.
If there was a premium release with a fancier handle (could wood work?) and a nicer blade profile (something like a gyuto or a french sabatier) I would be interested and I think it would reduce sticker shock (looks premium, expect premium price). I love the design of the charging tile though!
I watched the video and this seems pretty neat. Don't want to knock it or be negative. He's definitely right that most people's knives are dull – when I use knives in other people's homes I often just want to cry at how dull they are (also: pans – how the hell do so many people have dented damaged pans?) But you really don't need to splurge out €329 to have reasonably sharp knives.
All you need is a sharpening steel and use it once or twice after every usage. Even a cheap knife will last for years while remaining reasonable sharp. Mine was €6 or thereabouts at Tesco two years ago and is more than sharp enough.
Of course more expensive knifes (ultrasonic or not) are better and can hold an edge longer. You can spend more time, effort, and money on making them sharper than just a quick use of a cheap sharpening steel. If you want to spend the extra money: go for it! But for a normal home cook: you can go a long way with consistent use of a €10 sharpening steel.
I think it’s really cool, but not sure about the button design (seams to trap germs) and placement (index finger is not where I naturally exert pressure when cutting with a kitchen knife).
Also would be nice if it can be fitted to existing blades as handle retrofit, but I understand that might not be possible to properly tune the vibrations.
I was offered a CHEF'S CHOICE 15XV a few years ago and this is what I use to sharpen the knives at home (very ordinary knives).
I never knew if this was the summum of how sharp my knives could be, or where I bring them on a "sharpness" scale of 1 to 5 for a given knife.
I was also wondering if this depends on the knife - with some knives being better for such electrical sharpener and some worse.
"J. Robot Choppenheimer" is what earned my upvote.
If this knife works as well as the pitchman says, that's amazing. Just don't touch the edge.
I've gotten into the habit of using one of those slatted knife sharpeners before every use of my knife. It works well enough.
All I can think is how this would weaponize onion cutting.
And the chopping of serrano peppers.
How does this compare to the electric carving knives?
It's ultrasonic; the frequency is much higher while the amplitude is much smaller.
The video mentions that the knife vibrates over 40000 times per second.
Watch the video.
It's not obvious at first in the video, but they pre-cut a flat base into the plum to stabilize it on the table, and are cutting in at a slightdownward angle. I feel like you could make nearly the same shot with a regular knife. Tricks like this (and the deliberate filming angles to obscure those details) make the video seem disingenuous and come across akin to a snakeoil sales pitch, which detracts from my genuine interest in how the ultrasonic tech fares.
The shot of the scale showing force as they cut through a tomato was more compelling. I notice after the initial breach, when the knife is about halfway through, the forces are equal again. I assume that's due (at least in part) to friction between the inside of the tomato and the wide, side of the blade. Do they make a skinnier vibro-blade, or something like an ultrasonic cheese cutting wire?
Ultrasonic cheese wire is an awesome companion idea!
or a sonic cheese wire for chirping cheery tunes while chopping chunks of cheese
I've invested close to a thousand dollars in sharpening tools over the years. I keep my knives super sharp as a hobby more than anything. I'd still love to have one of these in the drawer for certain tasks. It's ugly and clunky but I'd probably still use it on a semi-regular basis for warm breads, cheeses, etc. I bet the action would help with sharpening as well.
I do wonder if a tuning fork or 'mass on a stick' hidden in the tang could provide enough vibration to help with the sticking. You'd probably have to smack it with every cut but it's so rarely a problem that would be fine.
Oh wow - would love to know what you got for sharpening, or what you'd suggest for the home cook?
When you say ugly/clunky - I'm guessing you mean it's a bit heavier, or the weight will be off compared to a good high-end chef's knife? (I don't have anything like that, haha).
I did note on their FAQ they say to never activate the blade whilst sharpening:
https://seattleultrasonics-ceizljlxnpt.gorgias.help/en-US/ho...
> Do not activate the ultrasonics during sharpening - this can damage both the blade and your sharpening stones, as the ultrasonic movement is too aggressive and not evenly distributed across the entire cutting edge. Also, reshaping the blade to a different belly curvature or tip shape can cause it to fall out of tune, so avoid removing more material than you would during normal sharpening.
Oh nice catch on the sharpening bit! I don't know that I'd be able to resist on the finer grits.
The only thing you really need to keep kitchen knives sharp is the habit of sharpening them. That said I've been using this recently for utility sharpening - https://worksharptools.com/products/precision-adjust-knife-s...
It's a bit clunky but I tend to obsess over the angle of the grind, and something that physically constrains that is going to allow me to enjoy the process. For general purpose sharpening you don't need much more than a coarse stone (320 grit) and a honing steel. The coarse stone will bring the edge back (learn how to feel for the burr) and regular use of the steel will keep it in good cutting shape until it wears down. You might not get hair-popping razor sharpness, but that's a fairly short-lived state with kitchen knives unless you do a lot of maintenance.
How well does it cut frozen food?
Probably not great, otherwise they would have shown it, but being able to cut frozen food properly would be a game changer. The only things I found working are saws, and they are messy.
I learned long time ago, if you are freezing it, freeze it in a shape that can be used frozen.
For instance, I flatten ground meat into 1lb "patties" and don't freeze it as a roll. I can literally snap the patty in half if I want half a pound, and the increase in surface area means rapid thawing if I place it, still in its storage bad (ziplock usually, but vacuum seal sometimes), into room temp water.
Super cool! I wonder if it would bother pets
Huh I didn’t even think about this. I’m assuming you mean the frequency is audible to dogs?
After culinary I was a cook/chef in starred/bib kitchens for 15+ years. I also apprenticed at an old school Japanese whetstone sharpening shop during that time period (my SF neighbors here probably know BC). I have a certain amount of expertise in this area and I can say unequivocally that there is no way this could be used for even moderate prep work. There's nothing wrong with the steel, it's a pretty standard SS, the size is a little too large for my hands, I like a 160, but 200 is a good middling size for most. It’s the vibrating. You know how your hands feel after holding a ~~vibrato~~…lawn mower for a while and then your hands feel like fuzzy pudding? There’s that, but the blade will shift constantly, and heaven help you if the motor goes wacky/dying.
I'm trying to think of a place for this in any kitchen, home or professional, and cannot see it being safe or all that useful...especially for $400.
It's a cool idea and really makes wanna go watch The Bad Batch again, BX Battle Droids carry vibroblades, but other than pure novelty it aint cuttin it for me.
Bonus for the buy-curious: Getchu a hydrodynamic spatula…jk. Get a nice 160mm - 200mm carbon steel gyuto, Tojiro makes pretty good entry level knives; a paring knife, and a Mercer white handle offset bread knife (a classic) and that’s all you need. For sharpening, a medium grit, muddy synthetic whetstone, I’m a huge fan of Aoto 2-4k, and you don’t really need much else for getting started, but in a way that even the serious pros will know you’re doing the right things. Maybe you need a strop, maybe. Chromium Oxide on leather or cork. Oh, and a SOFT wood cutting board. Hinoki wood is the undisputed king of cutting boards, or you could go with a no-trax self healing synth rubber if you have the $$. Put a wet kitchen towel/papertowel under your cutting boards so they don’t move around when you’re using them. Haste makes waste, and a wet towel is a hot towel.
Leave the money on the dresser.
It’s vibrating at a microscopic level. You won’t be able to feel it at all.
They claim to be the first, but a simple google search shows several other ultrasonic kitchen knives out there. (369sonic, etc.) dating back years.
It's the first ultrasonic CHEFS knife (afaik)
That looks really cool. Especially loved the wall of prototypes with raspberry picos etc.
Way outside the price range I'd consider personally but I look forward to having one in 5 years at a hopefully lower price point
The concept of the knife is interesting. I could see myself buying one if I had that much money lying around.
Maybe if the home chef who needs a leg up sees this it would prevent them from spending that much or more on more expensive knives and maintenance products. For those of us who know our way around the kitchen I’m not sure how much benefit I would get out of it.
Also did anyone think some of the cutting segments, particularly the radish, seemed sped up? The movement of the blade and hand looked a bit unnatural.
I like this vibro-knife “demo” by Neil Blompkamp’s Oats Studios: https://youtu.be/zaeFgSR_DMU
A different but far better piece of cutting edge technology is a modern, diamond-encrusted nickel/chrome-plated steel plate.
These things are now so sharp they can bring an edge profile back to a knife in five strokes without even needing lubrication (which is nice as water is a PITA when it causes corrosion between the steel bed and the plating.)
Every knife in your kitchen can be razor sharp in seconds and kept razor sharp whenever you need them to be. IMHO, far more useful than a single digi-vibro-knife.
Example product: Trend 300/1000 diamond sharpening kit.
Agreed. Even a knife with heavy usage only needs a few swipes to realign the edge. Warning though, sharpening things can be addicting. I have a massive straight razor and finishing stone collection. It's a wonderful hobby, but dipping into natural stones gets very expensive
I love these inventor stories, as the Chef's Knife does towards the end of the video. Another great one is Springfree trampolines, from NPRs How I Built This:
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/27/1031732394/springfree-trampol...
What happens when you “oops”? All the way through the bone?
He specifically says it's not a lightsaber, and when he's cutting the tomato you can see he does have to apply force for it to go through. He compares it to an ebike, where it makes cutting easier but it's not magic.
Same as a really sharp knife. In general though, dull knives are more dangerous. You have to cut with more pressure and they're more likely to slip.
There must be a limit though. Surely a light saber is not more safe than a dull knife.
If you’re used to sharp knives then it’s probably safer than applying more pressure which could yield in surprising ways. Getting used to it is the dangerous part, especially if not forewarned or the user doesn’t heed the warning.
Lightsaber would be different because doesn’t have a blade to guide.
Not really. The dangerous aspect of a knife is when it moves unexpectedly. The sharper it is, the harder it is to create a scenario where it jumps on something particularly dense, like when a saw hits a knot in a tree.
If you’re pushing down with hard force, it basically doesn’t matter if the knife is sharp anymore, it’ll just chop your finger off. However, with an extremely fine cut, it will be much easier to reattach, as the edges will match up well. With a dull knife, you’re not slicing, you’re more tearing your way through something.
It's not my impression that if you make a knife very very sharp it turns in to a lightsaber.
If you make it vibrate at ultrasonic speeds, maybe it has!
Actually, a light saber is 100% safe since it doesn't exist.
Counterargument: God(s)
Imagine how dangerous a dull lightsaber would be
You say this from any special knowledge or is it just your opinion from the video? Looks to me like it will go through your flesh and bone like they're not there, in a way even a razor sharp knife won't.
Also, while it's true that dull knives are in some ways more dangerous than properly maintained ones, that doesn't mean safety increases monotonically with sharpness. I sharpen my kitchen knives every weekend and I'm perfectly capable of achieving an edge I could comfortably shave with, but I deliberately don't (I skip the highest-grit step and leather stropping needed for that) because it's not optimal for the vast majority of cooking tasks. The only thing that happens regularly in my kitchen that needs razor sharpness is scoring the top of a sourdough loaf, and my wife uses actual razor blades for that.
This strikes me as more of a competitor to electric carving knives than something I'd want to replace a standard chef's knife with. It looks like it needs to be used with very great care.
Medical bone cutting knives are ultrasonic. I assume this one has a duller edge than those though.
Subsidized by Big Hook, no doubt.
If you cut all the way to the bone, the knife stops.
It is indeed more dangerous than a regular knife.
Does the vibration pass through the skin, via the handle?
Answered in the promo: no, you can't feel it.
Well I also don't feel the vibration of my doctor's ultrasound device. Doesn't mean there is no vibration.
I find it funny most of these comments are about how unnecessary this thing is.
To me it has immediate appeal to make cutting easier. It's also really not that expensive. I suppose this is the same site that is crazy about AI and thought Dropbox would flop. This thing has more utility than AI to me. I suppose being a software person can warp your perception of the real world.
Is this Hacker News or the TV Shopping Network?
Why can't you just buy a cheap whetstone and sharpen your knives when they're dull? I have a mid chef's knife from wustoff or zwillig, don't remember which, that I just keep sharp periodically when I notice it's dull. I've had it for years of home cooking.
Impressive dedication -- and what a refined looking product. Of course the real world use needs to match the advertising. I am not in the target segment (too expensive for me) but love to see such products and innovations across daily life tools -- hopefully this inspires others too.
Its capabilities don't look any different from what I've seen in TV ads over the last few decades.
The bit that looks actually interesting to me is buried in the middle of the video - while the ultrasonic switch is on, food visibly falls off the knife instead of sticking to the sides.
That non stickiness. I am curious if we do ultrasonic frying pan. Will it be non-stick as well?
This product is a huge gimmick. Buy a $20 double sided sharpening stone on amazon and you can keep even the cheapest stainless steel knives sharp and chef ready for years. Just basic knife sharpening skills are needed which you can pick up in 10 minutes on YouTube.
Theres a whole class of people who will pay more to not have to maintain things themselves. I bought an EV because they require little maintenance and I also hate filling up.
I have decent knives but have probably never sharpened them properly. If there are more reviews, I'd pick this up.
But I want a ultrasonic knife.
Same vibes, different frequency...
https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1245797052/vintage-60s-phili...
This looks really cool!
I was just curious about two things - seems there might be some knife aficionados or experts here!
1. Sharpening - As a home cook, who doesn't know a lot about knives/sharpening - how hard would this be to maintain? Would it be plausible to get some basic home sharpening gear, and maintain this myself? Or should I take it to a professional knife sharpener - and if so, how do I even know if they're a good one, and won't damage the blade, or perhaps are good, but somehow get the blade out of "tune" etc?
2. Safety wise - is there anything at all to be concerned about with ultrasonic 40Khz blades? Should I be wearing any hearing protection when using this? (Context - I have hearing loss in both ears, and wear hearing aids - keen to preserve my remaining hearing, and am understandably cautious about this kind of thing for my family and me).
awful handle ergonomics compared to any "real" knife e.g Wustoff or Victorinox.
No tang whatsoever, so the knife has no strength. It's probably unbalanced, which makes it awkward to use with finesse and speed. A year of heavy use and the "haft" will degrade to the point that it's dangerous.
Buy a proper carbon steel knife. You can keep it sharp forever with 5 minutes on youtube and $20 worth of kit from Amazon. Plus, it will never go flat.
I would get this for the same reason I'm planning to replace my couch with an optimal-for-moving-through-a-turn couch as soon as I find a carpenter willing to make it. The middle part will be evened-out by a separate, round cushion.
If you're an amateur and really want to spend this much money, get a good enough knife (e.g. the classic victorinox) and a chef's choice electric sharpener, and you won't have any more issues.
I've read multiple reviews saying the chefs choice sharpeners are basically useless. Having owned 2 of them I can confirm they seem to do almost nothing after the first few times using them.
A few YT knife channels have done deep dives showing why they stop working soon after purchase, the details escape me but I have to agree with the end result....
Which model did you have. I have the XV model and it is 90% as good as stones.
Can confirm, they're useless. Just pay someone $10 to sharpen the knife once in a while.
Such funny (and odd) takes on knives. They are tools, nothing more. I sharpen ours weekly, using a sharpener that wears down the blades. When they get too worn, they get replaced.
If you have a sharp knife and a wet cloth under your cutting board chopping is a joy, otherwise it's a dangerous, tedious, and exhausting task that turns so many people away from cooking entirely
My wood cutting board has rubber feet on the bottom. Seems like a much easier solution than handling a bunch of wet towels every day!
Yeah I have a few with rubber feet too. I still prefer a cloth as it dampens the impact of the knife so it's easier on your wrist.
Why a wet cloth?
The wet cloth between the counter and the cutting block keeps the cutting block from sliding / moving on you when force is applied, which is more comfortable and safer.
I cook every day, and I’m also a mechanical engineer, I’ve never understood where the sideways force comes from. I’ve also never had a board slide away from me. Tbh I thought this came from chefs chopping on stainless steel worktop. I’d like to understand.
Even if you're chopping perfectly vertically, a board will slide around or rock slightly. Like say you want to julienne some basil or something with a chef's knife, you'd probably be doing a rock chop, which involves lateral forces, causing the board to slide. Then also if you want to scoop up the food with the side of your knife, like scrape up minced garlic, those are lateral forces too. A wet cloth under a cutting board also softens/dampens the force of the knife hitting the board when chopping, which is nicer on your wrists.
Wood board on stone surfare when the wood isn't perfectly level and it will just rotate with very little force applied.
When you chop, you're applying force almost entirely vertically. When you slice, you're applying at least some force horizontally. That horizontal force can be transmitted through the knife to the food to the cutting board, causing the board to slide. It's especially noticeable when you're slicing food that is high, like a loaf of bread, and the cutting board is on a slick stone countertop.
I use silicone mat.
I think the wet cloth is meant to increase friction between the surfaces
So bad cutting boards don't slide.
It stops the board from sliding.
Stiction
I have an ultrasonic knife for reverse engineering. It's wonderful. It's also great for crafting.
I'm highly doubtful it's useful in the kitchen. Sharp knives would seem to do the trick.
On safety, if the blade is vibrating and I put my finger perpendicularly under it, will it cut the skin?
They show the knife being touched from the side but of course that's safe
Isn't this extremely dangerous? This will keep cutting without force through body parts untill it reaches the bone.
i guess that is why you need to keep pressing the button (also battery conserving too)
the guy mentions cutting self occurs mostly due to excessive force applied by the (amateur/inexperienced) user and i kind of agree.
other part is that the inattentiveness and distraction, maybe trying to be fast... although if i were able to cut through (pun intended) things that easily, i would be steadier hand...
As an aside, this feels very familiar as a sci-fi weapon, does that ring a bell for anyone? I was thinking William Gibson first but I can't place it there.
This could be the exemplar prototype for Dune knives that can penetrate a Holtzman Shield. Also recall in Dune there is an aversion to technology, so the simplicity and required human operation is a perfect fit.
> in Dune there is an aversion to technology
Just computers, no? IIRC they use knives because the shields stop fast-moving objects like bullets, so you need a slow-moving object like a knife.
Dune's vibrating shield and corresponding weapons.
Raven in Snowcrash? Not quite ultrasonic iirc but extremely thin, like the wire developed in three body problem
It's seemingly quasi-semi-related to The Foundation's 'atomic knives'?
evanghelion
dune?
I have not many virtues but i always keep knives sharp wherever i am. With this tool the last bastion has fallen …
I think eventually you do need to sharpen it, this thing delays it. But it seems like a good gift if it ain't too expensive.
Speaking of ultrasonic vibration... Is the audio in the video have noticeable warbles and pops for anyone else? I wonder why that is...
Somehow after looking at the video, it is hard to believe that it is actually much different than your standard knife.
It looks like a very cool product. Though it's too expensive for a regular guy who treats the cooking as a chore.
The demo videos show very poor knife skills.
For $500+ you can get a really, REALLY nice Damascus steel chef's knife with a beautiful patina and wood handle. Yes: it requires a bit more maintainable but nice things often require some work. When it's properly honed & sharpened, it'll cut just as well as this.
So you're basically saying that you can spend as much money to get a knife that will cut as well but requires regular work put into it, whereas this doesn't? I think that's the whole pitch here...
I think a lot of the commentary here is missing the main point — while you may not (I mean, certainly do not) need an ultrasonic chef's knife, it's a cool origin story, and the guy has the receipts! Years of iterations of circuit board design, blade shapes, and the robotic cut-test arm... I personally would enjoy using this in my kitchen just for the hacker vibes.
Although not a pro, or even a good cook, I do like quality knives — but, like most people who develop a casual nice-knife affinity, I then bought a few quality knives, a couple of junk knives to try restoring with a whetstone, a hand-made Japanese knife with my name on it, and... then I had enough kitchen knives to last the rest of my life, and there was no reason to buy any more.
This is the first one I have considered in years. Not because I need it, or because it's necessarily better at cutting must things than the workhorse Sekimagoroku nakiri I use[1] but because it's fucking neat and radiates nerdium waves.
This knife should be celebrated for what it is: basically an epic nerd project. That can also cut at least a few kinds of fruit more easily (or at least more enjoyably).
[1]: KAI model AE5206 (which seems very much like a Shun knife, made by the same company, but cost me only $53)
Crazy stuff, the Quantified Knife project seems even crazier.
This looks amazing. I love tech in Lindy products that actually works well.
Use a Hauser. German steel, whereas the Japanese know to forge a blade.
when I need a ton of whatever cut thin I just use a rotary slicer.
a knife is for detail work like stripping meat. on bulk/speed/uniformity you cannot beat a slicer with a knife.
So the issue with that tomato cutting test was that it was terrible form.
You obviously don't apply flat pressure on a tomato until it breaks, you slice it by sliding the blade forward as you push down. It's unclear to me that this blade offers any improvement over proper technique, and feels disingenuous to even offer that comparison.
100$ ...for a charger.
The tomato test is disingenuous - no one slices a tomato by pressing the knife straight down - you slice it to break the thick skin and follow with a slicing motion. The rest of the graph basically shows no difference between the force used for ultrasonic one and standard knife used inefficiently?
And yet, when people like to show off how sharp their knife is, dropping a tomato on it (blade-up obviously) and watching the tomato split in two is one of the favorite tests.
Probably (and precisely) because you can only achieve this with a knife that cuts very well.
That's nice and all but I don't think you want to be the guy that brings an ultrasonic knife to a knife sharpening competition.
I would buy the katana version, in Cyberpunk 2077!
cue the vibro-stab themed "thats not a knife....." and hey for extra murderyness it could be paired with a shock zapper
Just kids having fun.
I'm a sucker for good demos.
What does this device accomplish in the kitchen, besides being able to make fine slices of vegetables more easily? Electric carver knives beat it for slicing meat.
And then for most any other situation of knife usage it isn't necessary at all, as knives are mostly used for chopping. The one (1) thing I can see this being useful for is a shrunken down version for paring, but whether or not that is mechanically feasible, I don't know. The curve and the handle are more important than this vibro-verbing.
Nice dialogue, btw. "Help chefs feel great about themselves in the kitchen", "access to sous vide". <Kitchen Woke> ?
"Please sign in to confirm you're not a bot. This helps protect our community."
Um, no.
The website is just https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/cXjbSVt9XNM video embedded + a button to buy. (But it still tracks the referrer in the URL so it tells google that you went HN frontpage -> Ultrasonic Chef's Knife. It seems HN has put back referrer in the links :|)
Hackers news is now sneaking more and more ads. That's disappointin
$400 USD for a $50 Japanese stainless steel blade, and what amounts to the guts from a $10 electric toothbrush.
I mean I get that you spent some R&D money on developing this thing, but selling something direct to consumers at 10X the BoM cost is abhorrent.
LOVED!!! the presentation.
"Sorry honey looklike we have to eat out today because i forgot to charge my kitchen knife"
Umreeka can have geniuses only in tv shows at this point….otherwise we are reinventing knives!!
Metal Gear Solid vibes.
Knife skills are a necessary but not sufficient condition for being a good chef.
when your bag vibrates at airport security but, phew, it's not a sex toy it's ok guys it's just my knife everything's fine
I recently backed NeoBlade, which is an ultrasonic multi-blade cutting device for crafters. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hozodesign/neoblade
TL;DR it's really freaking cool, though the blades do seem to get dull fairly quickly. That said, they are made of a radically different grade of steel.
If the tech in the NeoBlade has been adapted successfully to the chef's knife, then all of the haters are going to sound like all of the early "you don't need an air fryer" pundits who totally missed the point and were clearly wrong.
Also, all of the "why would I care if I can aerosolize citrus" commenters have clearly never worked in a cocktail bar. Which isn't a knock; this is Hacker News, after all. Just know that there are people who make fancy drinks who would pay a lot to be able to do this easily. If you are the sort of person who spends time thinking about clear ice, you don't need this explained to you.
I'm still in the camp that air fryers are stupid. A convection oven does literally the same thing.
Also, portable air fryers make such small servings that they're useless for people with families. What the hell I going to do with three chicken wings?
You're technically right that an air fryer is a type of small convection oven, but dismissing them as "stupid" ignores why they're so popular. The point isn't that they reinvent physics, it's that they package convection in a way that's faster, uses way less electricity, is easier to clean, and perfectly sized for 1-2 people. Most folks aren't cooking for a big family every meal. I often just want to make fries, roast veggies, or crisp up leftovers. My Cosori lets me do that without heating the entire kitchen (and way faster, too).
I also simply don't have a convention oven. I rent my place, and it's not like I can just swap out the white goods.
Yes, the smallest ones are limited in capacity, but that's not the whole category. Larger models handle whole chickens.
The proof is in the market: people buy them in droves because they make food hot/crispy really quickly. A conventional oven can do the same thing, but it's like saying a desktop computer makes laptops "stupid". Technically true, but it ignores convenience, size, and efficiency, which are the reasons air fryers took off.
Anecdotally, most air fryers are owned by people who used to believe that they didn't need an air fryer. Have you actually had one in your life?
The only thing I use my oven for is pies for holidays and to brown large trays of meats for parties when my grill isn't available.
My wife cooks sausages in the oven but I think that is just plain wrong. That is however her singular usage of our oven.
Fwiw we don't cook much western food, and we eat almost no prepackaged food. An air fryer would serve us 0 use.
We do however use our instapot all the time!
I respect that. We're both operating with radically different goals and end results. If you're cooking primarily from a food culture that evolved without ovens then it's clear you don't need an air fryer OR a convection oven.
I would however suggest that this makes you poorly qualified to deem an entirely category of popular tools "stupid" just because you don't happen to use them.
> I'm still in the camp that air fryers are stupid. A convection oven does literally the same thing.
Air fryers are convection ovens, just with higher capacity fans relative to their own size compared to typical convection ovens (large convection ovens are sometimes coming with "air fryer" modes that replicate this, now.)
OTOH, aside from the utiltiy of having an additional smaller oven—which is not negligible, for many people’s cooking patterns—plenty of existing ranges include conventional rather than convection ovens, and adding an air fryer is a lot cheaper than replacing the range.
> Also, portable air fryers make such small servings that they're useless for people with families.
I have a family, and a countertop (I assume that’s what you mean by “portable”) air fryer/toaster oven, and I don't find that to be the case. We get a lot of use out of it.
Ovens take time to preheat.
It’s a very impressive video, but the ‘world’s first’ claim is BS: https://www.369sonic.com/ultrasonic-kitchen-knife/
“Chef knife” is the important part, the one you linked is a paring knife.
The wireless charging knife rest got me. I have utterly no use for this thing but it looks so goddamn cool that I want it anyway.
Your cat is gonna LOVE it!
Ok great, now Steve Jobs it and explain to my mom why she needs it
Wait until Gillette figures this shit out.
Don't buy dumb electronic kitchen gadgets.
Get a good steel knife, learn how to sharpen it properly, and you're set for life.
In particular, you don't need expensive stones, guides or lapping systems to do it. An aliexpress-grade 3000/8000 waterstone, a flattening stone and a strop will get most knives shaving the hairs off your arm for under £20 all-in.
The odds I will ever learn to use a waterstone or strop are nil. A Chef’s Choice manual sharpener is really easy and makes my knives plenty sharp enough to cut tomatoes.
Yeah they work fine too. The point is not that you need stones to sharpen knives at all, but you don't need insanely expensive glass or diamond stones like the YouTubers tend to tell you to get to shaving-sharp if you want to.
Just don't use a sharpener with the carbide v-blades that shave off slivers of metal or you'll get a knife with a concave edge that doesn't meet the board along the whole length and that really is a pain to fix (related note on that, a kitchen knife edge up in a vice is quite a disconcerting thing!).
I'd very strongly recommend vs the waterstone. Use a ceramic or diamond one. The strop is not required but it's nice.
Sharpening knives is quite the therapeutic process, at least it was for me when I learned to do them. Now I can sharpen knives at the bottom of a tea cup or even a brick.
Why? Your hands don't work?
They are really not that hard, especially if they come with the bit with the right angle.
>> Why? Your hands don't work?
That’s quite rude and unnecessary.
To answer the question, there is an infinite number of things I can do with my time. Learning that particular manual skill, especially when there is a very simple alternative, just doesn’t seem worthwhile to me.
Rude? Just asking because 10min to sharpen a knife every 3-6 months is not that big of a commitment, unless your hands don't work properly.
3000/8000 is a bad one. Both are way way way too fine. I'd very much like anything similar to 300/1200 + strop or so. I can shave with that.
Also I'd not use a soaking whetsone {anymore} (my spouse resents them for being that messy).
300/1200 is too coarse for AUS10. 3000/8000 is too mild (perhaps better for finishing). I suggest 1000/3000(or 6000).
Never heard it would be too fine for some steel. 300 is for creating a new edge or fixing chips or otherwise broken edge, 1000 and 3000-4000 is enough for maintaining a chefs knife. And if you can't get a knife sharp on 1000 you need to fix your technique.
I use the 300 only if the knives are too dull or I want to change the apex to 20 degrees. Honing them back is just the 1200 and a strop. Like mentioned I can shave with that. 3000 is overkill imo, unless you are looking for the mirror finish.
I agree. My experience: I bought some basic sharpening stones and watched some youtube and have had pretty good results with my basic japenese chef knives (~$100-150) that I've had for 15 years. It's 5 minutes of work every month or two for me. This product doesn't make sense to me for the price point. The aesthetics look really poor.
I agree. The industry standard for a great, boring, durable and surprisingly cheap knife is the Victorinox Fibrox Chef's Knife 20 cm.
The entire argument in the thread about how to best sharpen a knife is why people don't bother learning how to sharpen knives.
Like holy shit, I'm just going to pay someone a few dollars to do it because I don't want to bother sorting out all of the contradictory advice!
Maybe it’s dumb. But the video seems convincing. Ultrasonic knives are also used in some industrial and medical settings. So the concept does work. And the inventor of this one worked at Sansaire, Anova, and other kitchen hardware places. So they have a lot of credibility producing real products.
Of course, still need to sharpen, though.
I lost three fingers watching this video.
You'll be wanting the KnifeStop™, then.
Hehe, yeah I was wondering if something like SawStop could work. It would just need to switch off the ultrasonic, not spectacularly destroy the blade. However, I then remembered the frankfurter demo for SawStop and realised there are extra challenges for something that is actually intended for cutting meat.
I have a reciprocating saw in the shed already.
For $500 I'll just replace the handle of a regular knife with a vibrator.
at least make sure to clean the vibrator first