Introduction to Knives & Cutting Tools

Of all the tools in the cook's kitchen, the knife is the one that most directly expresses the cook's relationship with their craft. It is the oldest cooking implement still in daily use — unchanged in its essential form for thousands of years, yet continuously refined, regionally diversified, and deeply personal. A good knife, used with skill and maintained with care, is not merely a tool: it is an extension of the cook's hand, and the quality of the cuts it produces — the precision of a brunoise, the evenness of a julienne, the clean seam of a suprêmed citrus segment — is a direct expression of both the knife's quality and the cook's mastery.