After the fifth tomato, I needed to know the way my knife did. With out judgment, Heimendinger introduced that it positioned “second to final within the cohort.” I felt accountability for this knife, and a bit embarrassment, till I remembered his knives got here straight out of the field and into the testing course of with an unblemished manufacturing facility edge. My knife, then again, had been in common use in my check kitchen for greater than six months receiving solely the occasional honing. Plus, I famous protectively that these tomatoes appeared greater than those he used throughout his foremost battery of testing.
He continued by the opposite 4 meals: potatoes, cheese cubes, child carrots, and King’s Hawaiian rolls, the latter chosen for his or her extraordinarily uniform inside.
Understandably, my knife did not fare significantly nicely, however I used to be capable of get an appreciation for Scott’s testing and data-gathering course of.
Even with the robotic, gathering this quantity of knowledge took a number of time. Every bit of meals wanted to be loaded and unloaded from the size, the knife wiped, cleaned, and dried after each stroke, the room stored cool, the entire thing taking place throughout that monotonous bender of a weekend, Don Henley and Tears for Fears enjoying again and again.
As soon as he acquired all that information and made dozens and dozens of charts and graphs, what did he be taught?
“How scattered the outcomes are.”
Per his testing, three chef’s knives had been pretty blazingly implausible, doing nicely throughout the board: a Shun Traditional Hole Edge, a Moritaka Hamono, and a Tojiro Skilled. Quantity 4 was bizarre: The $300 Wüsthof Amici (similar to their implausible Traditional however with a special bolster and deal with) aced every little thing besides the carrots, at which it was fairly dangerous. The final two slots, 20 and 21, had been additionally nicely secured, by a Henckels Traditional and the $18 Zwilling Answer Wonderful Edge.
But the stuff within the center—slots 5 to 19, greater than two-thirds of the check group—had been what he was referring to when he mentioned “scattered,” performing nicely in a single class and poorly in one other.
“You’ll suppose that an awesome tomato knife would make an awesome potato knife,” he mentioned earlier than noting that wasn’t essentially the case. “It’s bananas.”
These three knives on the prime of his rankings really feel like protected bets. I might even really feel fairly good about lumping that Wusthöf in there. And if I had been contemplating buying a kind of two on the backside of his checklist, I might abandon the concept. However these 15 within the center? What about them?
For his half, Scott appreciated their lack of predictability.
“No person’s achieved this form of analysis. This could be the primary time we’re understanding that what issues for a tomato is totally different than what issues for a potato,” he mentioned. “Whenever you get these sorts of solutions in science, these are essentially the most thrilling.”
So what is greatest for a tomato?
I assumed he was going to generalize about blades, however as a substitute he mentioned the Wüsthof Amici, which, due to a very well-honed apex, simply sliced proper by.