Answer: A Nakiri Knife is a Japanese kitchen knife.
Nakiri knives are flat, single beveled blades which feature a small cutting edge that’s made from one continuous piece of steel from the tip to the heel. The blade has different uses for left and right-handed cooks, with the blade being turned 180 degrees when swapping hands.
In Japan, these knives are generally considered an entry level chef’s knife and can often be found in sets with either a yanagiba or usuba. They’re popular in traditional East Asian cuisine because their straight blades offer less space for food to get stuck beneath them when slicing through long vegetables like carrots and cucumbers.
What is a nakiri knife good for?
Answer: The nakiri knife is a vegetable cleaver, traditionally used for cutting up every type of veggie or mincing the smallest pieces of garlic.
Pronounced phonetically “nah-kuh-ree,” it derives its name from the Latin word meaning “to slice” and was originally known as an eel’s tail knife referring to its curved shape similar to that creature’s body. The narrow blade enables very precise cuts for decorative purposes while also working well with root vegetables.
Can I use nakiri knife for meat?
Answer: Absolutely not. Nakiri knives are a type of vegetable knife used for preparation of vegetables that can’t be cut on a chopping board or with a chef’s knife. They’re great for slicing, dicing and julienne vegetables, but they’re not suitable as meat knives because nakiris cannot be used to cut hard material like meat bones or frozen items such as ice cubes.
Many kitchen knives have blade lengths between 7-12 inches long, the most commonly-used being 10 inches in length. The necessary knowledge needed to be able to properly use kitchenware allows for safe handling of knives and the food products being cut by them.
Does a chef really need a nakiri knife?
No. You can get by just fine with a chef’s knife. Check out any of the cooking competition shows, and you’ll see that they all use a chef’s knife. In fact, in culinary schools around the world, most knives are designated as either “slicer,” “carver,” or “chopper.”
Those designations correspond to the type of cut that would be made with each type of blade – slicing along one side of food versus going across several cuts from top to bottom with an awl-shaped chopping blade.
