This site will give you the confidence to choose and use the knives and other nonelectric sharp tools in your kitchen. It’s also a reference site that you can use as you improve your skills and acquire the tools that will make you a better cook!

A spoon

Yes, a spoon isn’t sharp. And you can’t cut yourself with one. But a spoon can peel two foods better than a knife: fresh ginger and kiwifruit.

To peel ginger, simply scrape its skin with the side of a teaspoon. Removing the skin with a spoon is faster, easier, and results in a higher yield than when using a knife. This is because ginger always has an irregular shape. If you do use a knife, then by the time you’ve trimmed it and cut off the peel, you’ve lost quite a bit of the ginger. And in the same amount of time, you’d have finished the task with a spoon.

Kiwifruit uses a different technique and spoon. Cut off the ends of the kiwifruit. Then, slip a tablespoon between the kiwifruit’s flesh and skin. Gently rotate the spoon around the outside of the fruit. The skin will pop off, and you’ll have a round, peeled kiwifruit. If you peel a kiwifruit with a knife, you probably won’t end up with a smooth, round, peeled fruit. It’ll have straight sides where you trimmed off the skin with your knife.

Oyster, clam, and scallop knives

How to buy a knife

Cutting by the tongue is different from cutting by the knife.

If the throat can grant passage to a knife, the anus should wonder how to expel it.

The tongue of a bad friend cuts more than a knife.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring.

Stephen King

Obession is dangerous. It’s like a knife in the mind. In some cases... the knife can turn savagely upon the person wielding it... You use the knife carefully, because you know it doesn’t care who it cuts.

Knife Skills —

a kitchen guide to using the right knife the right way

A spoon

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Stephen King