4 key ways that butcher knives elevate your culinary skills
A professional knife set is always an excellent investment, whether you’re cooking for yourself and your family at home, or for customers in a commercial or industrial environment. Now, your individual skill as a chef unquestionably plays a major role in the quality of the final product. But your tools play an equally crucial role in the final results – in fact, more so than some people give them credit for.
We’ve got more than 30 years of experience to our name here at Butchers Equipment Warehouse, so you can count on us to know exactly how a quality set of butcher knives can elevate your culinary skills. Here are some of the most pivotal!
Carefully selected butchers’ knives provide extra precision
Cooking has always been described as an art rather than a science. And just like other forms of art, it requires creativity, patience, and precision. The first two are largely personal qualities, but that last attribute is something you can only really achieve with a decent set of butcher knives. That’s mainly because a proper knife set encompasses a variety of different blades, each suited for specific tasks.
A chef’s knife, for example, is most useful for slicing and dicing ingredients, whereas a butcher’s knife is best suited to heavier cuts of meat. Using the right tool for each job can allow you to produce cuts of consistent size and shape, enabling them to be cooked more evenly, resulting in more balanced flavours for the diner.
Quality butchers knives are safer to use
This is one that it can be easy to underestimate at first, but sharper knives are, somewhat counterintuitively, much safer to use. Picking a sharp knife that’s suited to the job at hand means it’ll make short work of the cut you’re working with. Unlike with blunt knives, sharp knives ensure there’s minimal resistance, which reduces the chances of the blade slipping (and the associated injuries).
The best butcher knives also tend to feature ergonomic handles, reducing the chances of strain or muscle injury with extended use. Repetitive Strain Injuries can be serious issues in themselves – but they can also weaken your cutting form, in turn increasing the risk of accidents. Ergonomic handles can protect you from these risks, so you can make effective cuts with complete peace of mind.
Increase efficiency and time management
Using a blunt or unsuitable knife can make cutting a laborious, tedious, and sometimes even dangerous task, as we’ve covered above. However, a proper knife set equips you with everything you need to tackle the job quickly and efficiently, so that you can make short work of any job with no worries about any loss in quality or presentation. The ability to become more efficient with jobs like meat trimming, filleting and vegetable preparation is particularly valuable in intensive commercial environments, where time pressure is an ever-present factor – so in this way, it can help reduce your stress, as well as improve quality.
Explore new creative opportunities
This is an often-underestimated advantage of using a proper butcher knife set – it can give you the tools to explore a whole new world of various techniques and styles, from robust cuts of meat to more intricate julienne cuts. That can unlock new options for preparing and presenting meat, which give you access to a whole new range of creative opportunities to expand your skills (and your menu!). The versatility of each blade can come in handy here too – the butcher knife, for example, can be used not just to slice tougher cuts of meat, but the flat of the blade can also be used for things like crushing garlic – so you can make your preparation process even more fluid than before.
Those are just a couple of general examples – you might well be able to think of a few more specific ones of your own! Whatever the case, investing in high-quality knives is essential for anyone who loves to cook, professional or otherwise. With the perfect chef’s knife, you can confidently tackle any culinary task that comes your way.
All the blades we stock are of unrivalled quality, including options from leading manufacturers like Victorinox and Icel, so you can rest assured you’re only getting the best. And, of course, they’re all available at the best prices at Butchers Equipment Warehouse. You can check out our extensive range of chef knives and butcher’s knife sets right here on our site. And if you need any advice, don’t hesitate to contact us on 01254 427721, and we'll be happy to answer any questions!