What's Hot With Culinary Knives | Jonas Blade

What’s Hot with Culinary Knives?

Everybody knows the knife is the core of any chef’s toolkit. It is one of the most used tools in any kitchen, anywhere in the world. The knife has been part of the culinary world since cooking became cooking, and it’s not likely to fall out of use anytime soon. But some trends do come and go. So, what’s hot with culinary knives in 2024? 

Though most consumers will never think about it, there are trends in knife steels. These are influenced heavily by advances in materials science. What’s hot with culinary knife steel at the moment? Stainless steel. Fifteen or twenty years ago, it played a very distant second fiddle to high carbon steel. In quantitative performance metrics (e.g. wear resistance, sharpness, toughness, etc.) the best stainless steels still fall a little short of the best high carbons alloys, but they have closed the gap tremendously.

One thing that sets stainless steel apart from high carbon steel is what it takes to heat treat a blade. (Heat treatment is the set of thermal processes that determines the degree to which any piece of steel can perform to its full potential.) As steel alloys grow more exotic, the requirements for heat treatment grow more strenuous. So what trends are hot with culinary knives? Molten salt pots, argon-purged kilns, fluidized sand furnaces, liquid nitrogen cryogenics, and the latest in quenchant formulations. 

Once you’ve selected and heat treated your steel, the next hot topics in culinary knives are blade shape and cross section. The European chef has been a longstanding classic. But do you go with a German profile, or do you favor a French? And these days, Japanese shapes—the gyuto, the santoku, the sujihiki, the kiritsuke, and more—are finding their way into western hands more and more, as well as hybridized forms. 

When you talk about the cross section of a blade you’re talking about its grind. How thick is it at the spine, and how directly does it taper down to the edge? Is it flat ground? Convex? Hollow? Chisel? Or even a compound grind? One that’s hot right now for culinary use is the “s” grind of a knife, which features a convex or hollow area above the edge, and then a flat or convex edge section beneath that. It offers good weight distribution, stiffness, and food release, but without the compromise in edge durability that a fully hollow-ground blade often suffers.

Handle materials will always be hot with culinary knives, and especially in the custom world. If you are looking for pure, rugged performance, you’re looking at synthetics like G10, micarta, Grip-Tek, and carbon fiber. If you’re looking for class, you are looking at stabilized woods. Stabilized woods retain all of their original, organic material, but with the vacuum-aided injection of resin, they are rendered more stable (and therefore more durable) by orders of magnitude relative to untreated woods. The process hasn’t even been around long enough to know just how long a block of stabilized wood might last, but it will certainly last longer than the alternative!

Is it worth keeping track of what’s hot with culinary knives? Absolutely. If they are your jam, then you’ll want to know what’s out there on the cutting edge. After all, the knife is at the core of any chef’s toolkit.

At the same time, you would want the best culinary knife to look and perform the way you need and want it to. Contact Jonas Blade to commission that for you.

About The AuthorZack Jonas was born and raised in Massachusetts in the 1980’s and is still a New Englander today. With his growing love for art over the years, he took an introductory bladesmithing class at MASSart. It was there that he learned one of his most valuable lessons, which is that everyone has some insight worth learning. Today, he is a full-time bladesmith and feels incredibly fortunate to have found his calling.