A Western knife block answers every job with a different knife: a chef's knife for slicing, a small one for peeling, something heavy for bone, and a bench scraper to move it all. A Chinese kitchen answers all of that with one blade, and after a few weeks of cooking that way the block starts to look like clutter.
The flat of the blade is the part people miss. Slice with the front, then turn the knife on its side and use the face to lift the whole lot into the wok, with no tipping the board and no scraper. Lay the flat over a garlic clove and lean on it and the clove is crushed and peeled in one motion. The broad face bruises spring onion, flattens ginger, and shifts a mountain of shredded cabbage in a single pass.
Then there is the heel. This is a slicer-chopper, the everyday Chinese pattern: keen and fine at the front for vegetables and meat, thicker and heavier towards the heel so it will go through a chicken joint or a rack of ribs without you reaching for the heavy cleaver you probably do not own. A Western chef's knife asked to do that will roll its edge.
It is heavier than a chef's knife, and that is the point. You are not pressing down through a carrot, you are letting the weight fall, which is why cooks who switch to a cleaver find their wrist stops aching.
Made in Yangjiang, the knife-making town in Guangdong, by Shibazi. 30Cr13 stainless, hand-finished and finely ground, with a hanging hole in the blade.
Looking after it
Hand wash and dry it straight away rather than leaving it in the rack. It takes a normal whetstone or pull-through sharpener.
Specifications
| Steel | 30Cr13 food-contact stainless |
| Pattern | Slicer-chopper, vegetables, meat and small bone |
| Finish | Hand-finished edge, finely ground |
| Origin | Yangjiang, Guangdong |
| Model | 8227 |
| Shipping | Ships from our UK warehouse |
