Santoku
A general-purpose Japanese kitchen knife combining the virtues of fish, meat, and vegetable knives.
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The santoku bōchō or bunka bōchō is a general-purpose kitchen knife originating in Japan. Its blade is typically between 5 and 8 inches long, with a flat edge and a sheep's foot-tipped blade that curves down at an angle approaching 60 degrees at the point. The term santoku may refer to the wide variety of ingredients the knife can handle—fish, meat, and vegetables—or to the tasks it can perform: chopping, dicing, and slicing. The term bunka refers to how it is used for the cultural food of Japan.
Quick Facts
- Type
- Kitchen knife
- Origin
- Japan
- Blade geometry
- Sheep's foot tip
- flat edge
- bilateral cutting edge with 12–15 degree shoulder
- Primary uses
- Chopping
- dicing
- slicing fish
- meat
- and vegetables
Facts from the source article.
Lore & Background
The santoku knife design originated in Japan, where traditionally a deba knife is used to cut fish, a gyuto knife is used to cut meat, and a nakiri knife is used to cut vegetables. This knife was created in the 1940s to combine the three virtues of each of these traditional knives into one universal generalist knife.
Reader's Guide
Santoku blade geometry incorporates the sheep's foot tip, which draws the spine down to the front with very little clearance above the horizontal cutting plane. It has limited rocking travel compared to a German/Western-style chef's knife. The santoku is shorter, thinner, and lighter, with more hardened steel than a traditional European chef's knife.
Standard blade length is between 15 and 18 cm. A classic santoku incorporates a European-style bilateral cutting edge but maintains a more extreme 12 to 15 degree shoulder. Santoku knives typically have no bolster, sometimes incorporate fluted sides (Granton edge), and maintain uniform thickness from spine to blade edge.
More in Kitchen Tools
Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Santoku (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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