I spent a couple months looking for a knife to give my close friend as a wedding gift. He is an engineer, and appreciates material properties and well manufactured products. So I went to work researching kitchen knives.Steel:
Messermeister doesn't give the specific steel they use, but they do divulge a few of the properties. "High carbon, molybdenum vanadium steel" is what they say on their website about this knife's steel. High carbon is pretty common of stainless steel knives. This isn't some argument about the finest steels with the perfect carbon balance, but it is reassuring that they at least claim high carbon. Vanadium, on the other hand, is good stuff. According to Zknives.com vanadium forms the hardest carbides and creates a fine grained steel. It is one of the best additives you could incorporate into steel. Overall Vanadium contributes to harden-ability, toughness, wear resistance, and allows a knife to take a very fine edge. I have another knife with Vanadium in the steel and I can shave my neck with the edge it takes. Needless to say I slice through any food with ease. Messermeister also states on their website that they harden this knife to 58 Rockwell harness. Many Japanese blades are up around 60-63 from the research I did, but 58 isn't bad at all. This is a hard steel, but not so hard that you will spend great amounts of time to sharpen the edge. Overall, the knife came out of the box shaving hair off my arm without effort, and cutting food like a hot knife through butter (not a promotion to heat this knife to cut through butter.)
Balance & Weight:
The quality of steel allowed them to make the blade strong and rather thin. This isn't like the German kitchen knives that are made of soft steel and are as thick as a machete. It was far lighter than my german knives, with a bigger blade, and the balance was astounding! I must admit that I almost kept this knife for myself my friend was lucky it made it to him...
Handle:
This is more traditional Japanese design. It isn't the ergonomic design you see a lot of knife makers use these days, but this doesn't mean it isn't comfortable. My hands aren't incredibly small or large, but the knife was handled by several hand sizes and they all felt like the handle was comfortable, balanced, and extremely usable.
Blade & Knife Shape:
This knife definitely has a little bit of a unique curvature. In my short testing I found this to be very nice. Since the handle was slightly angled up I felt like I was able to apply pressure more effectively in my cutting motions. I also felt like it improved the rock motion for chopping that chef knives are designed to provide. The spine dips to meet the tip of the blade, and this made the knife more effective for working with vegetables to make cuts with the tip of the blade.
Conclusion:
Is this the perfect knife? No, but I sure liked it, especially for the price. It is hard to find a good knife that is made of good steel, and produced in Japan, that doesn't cost a great deal of money. There were a few other knives that were in the running that I found in my research, and I am sure they would have performed very well. For me I wanted to know about the composition of steel, and the hardness of the steel, so I could know how well it would hold an edge and how long it would stay sharp. I assume most people want a knife that is sharp and will stay sharp... It also helped that Messermeister also let me know the degree to which they sharpened the edge. I would recommend this knife to anyone, but keep in mind that 15 degree angle when honing, sharpening, and cutting. It is quite acute, and very sharp.
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