The Internet containeth all things, both sense and nonsense. When it comes to knives, there’s plenty of the latter.
A recent outbreak is the Serious Eats essay—sermon, actually—titled“Why Serious Cooks Use Carbon Steel Knives,” Really–using stainless means you’re not a serious cook?
Serious cook—how to define that? Someone who boldly goes beyond PB&J, ramen and mac and cheese? Someone whose “famous meatloaf” contains a secret ingredient? Well now we know. It’s a cook pledged to carbon-steel knives.
After a double dose of non-too-subtle salesmanship, in this case re the author’s favorite Japanese blade, a Misono–plus almost all others), the author, Chef Carbon, if you will, gets down to cases.
He begins wistfully (“I’ve been quietly in love with carbon-steel knives for a long time, and after a lot of thought, I’ve decided that it’s time to share it with the world. . . . For a long time, I lived in denial of how strong my feelings were”). Then with a sneer he unleashes his inner snob: “If you just want to get dinner on the table, not think about your knives beyond whether they’re just barely sharp enough to blunder their way through an onion, and not worry if you mistreat them to no end, then yeah, stick with stainless.”
Whoa!
Anthony Bourdain, Gordon Ramsay, Wolfgang Puck, Ina Garten, Nigella Lawson, David Chang and many others—have they ever been so briskly dismissed?
Chef Carbon claims as absolutes carbon steel’s advantages: harder than stainless; easier to sharpen; gets sharper and stays sharper. But then, perhaps sensing thin ice, he hedges: “metal experts [might] say I’m wrong . . . . I know I’m generalizing here—but of all the kitchen knives I’ve ever worked with, carbon steel knives sharpen way more easily.” (And how he loves whetstones and sharpening!)
Rhapsodizing about sharpness, Chef Carbon brags that his favorite blade sliced through his cut-resistant bag and into his finger. As for “downside: carbon steel is more fragile. . . . more brittle [and] more likely to chip if you drop it or toss it into the dishwasher”, the rust, the stains, the reactions with acidic foods? “I actually think carbon steel’s reactivity is a great thing. Why? Because it forces the cook to treat the blade with some real damn respect.”
He admits, almost boasts of abusing stainless knives, dumping them in the sink to be buried among plates and bowls. But his Misono? “Not for one nanosecond . . . I handle my carbon steel blade like a samurai treats his sword. It’s all reverence and care, 100% of the time because the knife demands it”. . . . Caring for a carbon-steel knife requires ritual-like devotion.” A massage (with mineral or tsubaki oil), “is how I say goodnight to my favorite blade**.”**
Clearly, Chef Carbon is besotted mainly with the rites and ceremonies of coddling his Misono. But being high priest of his own cult is no excuse for treating the rest of us as if we are frivolous bumpkins.
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