A knife is the most important tool in the kitchen. Professional chefs recognize each other from the calluses they have on their palms. This is our favourite knife. We bought it about twenty years ago at a store just outside of Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo and have used it almost every day since. It is about as simple as a knife gets - steel, grey and a bit soft, a wood handle, stained with sweat and food. We hand sharpen it on only one side, most times we use it. And it cuts well. This knife is perfect for cutting vegetables, or any meat without a bone, and with its wide blade it is easy to use it to carry things to the pan. The handle fits our palms, whether because it has shaped our palms or they have shaped it - and over the years we have cooked together using this knife our hands have become more alike. The balance is not perfect, the balance point is about two centimeters past the end of the handle, but the knife is light enough that this hardly matters, and given that we chop using a Japanese style (moving the whole blade up and down rather than resting the point on the chopping surface) this may even be an advantage. We keep a newer version of this knife in Vancouver, one we got about five years ago at the same shop, but the older one in Boston is the one we use when we have a choice.
Today, the last day of May 2008, this knife sliced a grapefruit, sliced a red onion and four mushrooms, diced up four tomatoes (a bit old and soft), sliced some lemon and scraped the bottom of the pan.
