Customer review of Misono Swedish Carbon Steel Chef's Knife

Review of Misono Swedish Carbon Steel Chef's Knife (240mm/9.5")
By: L. Smith, Mississauga, ON, Dec. 2009

Now that I've lived with my Misono Swedish Steel gyutou for a few months - and given myself a proper cut with it - I'm ready to venture an opinion.

I should start with a disclaimer, though: I haven't compared it with hundreds of other knives. It would be interesting, in particular, to live with this knife and the UX-10 for a few months, to see what differences appear. Also, I'm using this knife at home. I'm not a working prep-cook, so my knives don't get truly heavy use. That said, it's really a great knife.

Fit, finish, sharpness
Buying a knife because it's sharp is like buying a case of wine because it's cold. Still, the knife arrived admirably sharp. I can find no fault with the fit of the handle or rivets.

Design
The handle is a little larger than most, which I find that I like quite a bit. the knife is comfortable and very well balanced. (If you pinch it at the base of the blade, it balances exactly). It took a little while to get used to the asymmetrical bevel of the cutting edge. The knife does steer a little -- I'll reduce this over the next few years of sharpening.
I like the absence of a full bolster: they only get in the way when you're sharpening, and in a few years, you wind up with a blade with an arch near the heel.

Performance
Of course, the only reason to buy a non-stainless knife is for its steel. This is indeed great knife steel. Some reviews of the Swedish Steel line have commented that the steel is highly reactive. This is not true. It's picking up a bit of patina now, but this steel is not nearly as reactive as the pure carbon steel in my older knives. In fact I suspect, on the strength of this observation, that there's a little chromium in the alloy. Chromium is what makes stainless steel stainless, and if it's really important to you that your knives be pretty, then chromium is what you want. The down-side of chromium is that it greatly increases the tendency of steel to work-harden, that is, to get harder and stronger when deformed. Most stainless steels actually need specialized machining techniques, because work-hardening leads to excessive wear of the tools used to cut it. In a knife, the effect is to make it much harder to restore an edge. The sharper (and therefore more fragile at the edge) you like to keep your knives, the worse this gets. It is quite literally true that I spend more time maintaining the edge on a little Global stainless steel 3" paring knife than on any other knife on my rack. The good news is that what little chromium (I suspect) there is in the Swedish steel does nothing to impair its sharpening performance. Lightly honing on a ceramic steel and finishing on a barber's strop (loaded with green paste metal-polishing compound) is all that's needed to keep the gyutou razor-sharp for weeks on end, at least in a home kitchen. Since I check this every now and then, I look like my forearms have the mange -- little bald patches here and there.

Sharpening on 1000/4000 grit Japanese water stones is a breeze. the burr lets go just as easily as on an antique Sabatier, leaving an edge that would do a scalpel proud.

I guess you do need to be a bit of a knife nut to want a carbon steel chef's knife. But if you're already spending any amount of time on the stones, trying to keep your knives really sharp, then you'll likely find that the Misono rewards your efforts much more fully than a stainless knife.