For knives pre-designed for a specific group of users like the Santoku, you won’t find many length variations.

It performed every cutting task in our testing especially well, making it a workhorse when it comes to meal prep.Do not, by any means, let your edge hit glass, granite, marble, or ceramics—not even a quick slice on a dinner plate. We tested with home cooks in mind and evaluated how well each knife cut and retained an edge after slicing and chopping through onions, whole chickens, cooked steak, carrots and cheddar cheese. It has a thin, rounded handle, similar to Japanese-style knives, but feels sturdy and natural in the hand — a pro for new cooks. For more recommend knives, consult our guides to the best boning knives, paring knives and steak knives. Depending on the composition of your knife’s steel and how often you use it, that could mean every six months to a year.

Our pros keep reaching for it due to its comfortable grip and weight as well as its ability to tackle any cutting task. The handle is larger than that of our top pick, and testers with large hands liked the generous knuckle clearance.If you regularly use your knife for heavy-duty tasks (like breaking down whole poultry), it’s worthwhile considering a boning knife for that task. There is no kitchen knife more important than a chef's knife, unless, of course, you're an Italian nonna, in which case you can probably break down a cow with a dull paring knife. They're more forgiving in terms of handedness than traditional Japanese knives—it's possible to use them in the non-intended hand, but doing so is not ideal. This knife weighed in at 264 grams, making it one of the heavier ones in my tests, but, unlike some of the other clunkers in the group, the Wüsthof's blade didn't feel overly leaden or clumsy.

This knife, the UX10, is its top-of-the-line model, and one that both Kenji and Sohla have sworn by. Some are full bolsters, meaning they cover the whole back end of the blade, while some are semi-bolsters that cover only a portion of the blade.

The knives that I ended up recommending are ones that we both approve of, which should help cover a more diverse range of cooks and hand preferences. It'd work fine if you held it by the handle only and not at all up on the blade, but that's not how we hold a knife, nor how I'd recommend holding one. A. Henckels Twin Four Star II Chef's Knife: This knife performed well on almost all the tests until it was time to cut the carrots, at which point it cracked them repeatedly instead of slicing through them cleanly. While certainly more expensive than others on our list, the Chef’s Knife from Miyabi is stunning and effective.

Adding to the challenge, most Western-style Japanese knives have a double bevel that's asymmetrical—the blade edge is sharpened on both sides, as in Western knives, but it's not sharpened at the same angle on both sides the way a true Western chef's knife is. You might not have a sous-chef just yet, but that doesn’t mean you have to go on without a dependable culinary sidekick. Our consumer testers liked that it didn’t feel as though they’d easily ruin this knife, and they found it to be nice and sharp.

This means it "won’t brown foods, won’t transfer a metallic taste or smell, and will never rust," Kyocera says.