Santoku vs. Chef Knives: How to Use Common Kitchen Knives

A Japanese-style santoku knife is a general purpose knife you can use to cut, slice, and chop. The word santoku means “three virtues,” in reference to these triple common uses of the blade. Kitchens may stock santoku blades alongside chefs’ knives, but key differences between the two remain.

A chef knife, or chef’s knife, is a common and versatile type of kitchen knife that is more prominent in the West. While this type of knife bears a resemblance to a santoku knife and can do many of the same things, it distinguishes itself in its basic makeup and design.

Santoku and chefs’ knives share a fair amount of similarities, but there are four main areas in which they differ.

1. 1. Material: Knifemakers turn to carbon steel when building santoku knives, while they prefer stainless steel for chefs’ knives. Carbon steel is often much more refined after knife sharpening than stainless steel, so exercise extra caution when handling a santoku knife’s cutting edge.
2. 2. Point of origin: Chef knives are Western knives; their basic design originated in seventeenth-century Germany. Santoku knives hail from Japan. Over time, manufacturers have adapted and evolved both the German and Japanese knives to meet specific chefs’ needs in different cultures.
3. 3. Shape of the blade: A santoku knife has a single bevel (there is only one side with a sharp edge) and a curved blade; a Western-style chef’s knife blade has a double bevel (each side of the blade is sharp at the top) and comes to a pointed tip. Blade length depends on each specific model, but chef knives are generally longer. Both types of knives may have a straight edge or a Granton edge (a blade with indentations).
4. 4. Uses: Santoku knives have thinner blades in comparison to the wider blades of chef knives. As a result, cooks tend to prefer santoku blades when making extra-thin slices. Chef knives’ wider blades make them more useful when you are deboning or disjointing meat, although a cleaver might be better suited to that task, depending on the size of the piece. To practice good knife skills, use a rocking motion with either knife for precision cutting, dicing, mincing, or paring on a cutting board.

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