Food - Drink
All Home Cooks Should Know About One Particularly Versatile Knife
By LISA CURRAN MATTE
There's a unique type of kitchen knife that is an underrated favorite among professional chefs, and is now gaining traction with home cooks: the Japanese petty knife.
The blade of a petty knife ranges from four to six inches in length. This makes it less cumbersome than a typical chef's knife, which can be up to 14 inches long.
The petty knife's small size doesn't make it less versatile. It's a great choice for mincing, chopping, and peeling ingredients, and can even sub in for paring or boning knives.
These knives are also great for precise work like cutting veggies into brunoise and chiffonade shapes, and it can also perform heavier-duty tasks like slicing and trimming meat.
There are two petty knife handle shapes: Japanese (Wa) and Western (Yo). Western-style knives have a three-rivet flat handle familiar to most American cooks.
Japanese-style handles are more rounded, shaped like an elongated oval, octagon, or D-shape. Either way, petty knives can be handled more comfortably by cooks with smaller hands.
You can also choose between more expensive carbon steel, which is easy to sharpen and holds its sharpness longer, or cheaper stainless steel, which resists corrosion and chipping.