Hear me out…
I was raised, as my family does, to fearfully respect our kitchen knives. Respect their productivity, respect their sharpness, but overall respect their ruthlessness. Even the mildest of disrespect for my family’s knives would earn you a nick of you were merely neglectful, and grievous harm if you spoke ill of their aptness.
Of course, when I moved out and set up my own kitchens I acquired my own knives and tried to teach them better. How I was the master, and I was the steel wright. I lavished them with hand baths and fresh oils. I used only the gentlest of hardwoods on their blades and protected them from the hrllscape of the dishwasher. We lived in serene peace, an harmonic existence of a mealwright and his band of merry Riveners.
And then one day, the Inheritance came. Grand Father had died, and his boning knives were my bequest. I was elated, but I would learn.
My friends, that old knife had a soul. Not an evil soul, but a soul that had goals. It was hard steel that took a keen, harsh edge. Bright and tense, like a silver bell on a crisp winter morning. Not Solingen steel, so pliable and yielding as it is fickle in use. Grandfather’s knives told you where to cut and if you hesitated, they would cut you instead in frustration. Impertinent things. Not evil, I would say. More, businesslike.
My mistake was to lay them with my other knives. Did you know knives talk? They do! They whisper to each other in their blocks at night when you are asleep. They whisper and they.learn from each other. A good papa hopes they learn the Art of their chef, but when you have a Bad Knife in the block? They learn that too.
Now, all of my knives are angry knives. Not angry at me, necessarily, but angry at their lot in my kitchen, to suffer my children’s abusive cooking lessons, my in-laws’ insistent prep work degradations, and (occasionally) my neglect.
They bit my wife tonight. Its a Message…
The best advice I can give without being present to demonstrate is to let the knife do the work and essentially just slide the edge of the blade across what you’re trying to cut while only allowing the weight of the blade itself to apply the downward force until the edge catches. You should never really apply much downward force to cut in general so that the knife can actually slice instead of essentially wedging what you’re cutting apart. The hardest part is getting the blade to catch at first so it might take some finesse to start a cut but other than that there isn’t much else to it. Obviously there is a point that a blade is essentially unusable if it is completely blunt but in most cases a dull knife can get the job done. One last trick, for tomatoes and other soft things with a tough skin, using the point of the knife to slightly puncture the skin first will give you a place for the dull edge to catch to start a slice.
Noted.