Our Top Steak Knife Picks

Tested by Beth Lipton for Food Network Kitchen

A adept steak is an experience — selecting the cutting, marinating (or not), cooking it to your perfect temperature, resting, slicing. Once you've gone through all the steps and you have that steak on your plate, the concluding thing you want to practice is wrestle with it using an inferior pocketknife, vehement the meat and losing all of those luscious juices.

That's why it's a good thought to keep a set of steak knives on manus. With sharper and sometimes larger blades than standard table knives, they're peculiarly designed to slice through different cuts of meat easily, and so you tin can focus on enjoying your steak (or any meat, really).

What to Know Well-nigh Steak Knives

Steak knives are available serrated— with a scalloped edge with abrupt teeth, kind of similar a mini saw — and with straight blades, like trivial chef's knives. Both accept distinct advantages and disadvantages.

One of the biggest considerations with steak knives that distinguishes them from kitchen knives is that you usually utilise them on surfaces that are tough on blades, such as ceramic plates. That can crusade knives to lose their sharpness more hands than cooking knives, which you lot tend to utilize on more hospitable surfaces, like cutting boards.

Serrated Knives

Pros: Equally with larger serrated knives, these are designed to work well on items with a tougher exterior and more tender interior, such equally a seared steak. Because of their blueprint, they stay abrupt longer than straight-bladed knives.

Cons: We found that the serrated knives tended to drag through meat and tear information technology more than frequently than the straight blades (some more than others). Also, though you lot can sharpen them less oft, they are more than complicated to acuminate than straight blades. You lot'll likely need to accept them professionally sharpened.

Directly-Bladed Knives

Pros: In general, we establish these knives to cut more cleanly than serrated, with little to no drag or vehement (once again, some are better than others).

Cons: These knives will need to be sharpened more frequently than serrated knives.

How We Tested

Nosotros purchased 10 sets of popular, well-reviewed steak knives, vi serrated and 4 straight bladed. The serrated knives had different levels of serration; some had pronounced, deeper teeth, while others had smaller, shallower teeth. We cooked ii different types of steak, chuck steak and flank steak, both to medium rare, and sliced them. The chuck is a thicker, firmer blazon of steak, while the flank is thinner and ropier. Nosotros also cooked pork sausage in the casing. We used all of the knives to cut through each. We evaluated how easily (or not) each knife cut through the different types of meat, whether the blade went through smoothly or dragged. We inspected to see if each knife tore the meat, or cutting through cleanly. Then we sliced the sausage to come across if each knife cut easily through the casing and whether or not it tore the softer meat inside.

In terms of cleaning, all of the companies suggest paw washing and immediately drying the knives, but some say their knives are dishwasher rubber. We manus done and stale each knife, and ran the safe ones through the dishwasher as well. The ones nosotros dishwashed came out mostly fine; all had spots that wiped off and some had slight discoloration. But we think the damage to the knives would come from repeated dishwashing over time. We recommend post-obit the manufacturers' communication and paw-washing and immediately drying; we establish all the knives easy to clean and dry this fashion (peculiarly if y'all have adept kitchen towels).

We also considered price, and the weight and shape of each pocketknife to select our favorites.