"sf" > wrote in message
...
> A bread knife is probably what the OP needs, because s/he obviously
> has no idea what a *real* chef's knife can do. To say that even a
> middlingly sharp chef's knife can't cut through winter squash reeks of
> not having any knife skills and screams that s/he doesn't know wtf
> s/he's talking about.
>
>
<http://www.amazon.com/Wusthof-Classi...00005MEH1/ref=
sr_1_1?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1390890534&sr=1-1&keywords=wusthof+chef%27s
+knife>
>
<http://www.amazon.com/Zwilling-J-A-H...Steel/dp/B0000
4RFLI/ref=sr_1_3?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1390890610&sr=1-3&keywords=hencke
ls+chef%27s+knife>

The typical application I like micro serrated blades for is cutting through
a thick citrus skin. Sure, a sharp chef's knife can do lots of things
including this. But the feel of a nicely microserrated blade going through
a citrus skin like butter - with very little force applied - just feels like
a perfect fit to the application and it feels safer. Paying attention to
your experience and skill level is not evidence that you don't know what you
are talking about. That's evidence that you have some common sense and
actually pay attention to facts that matter to your personal situation. I
cannot use the same knife technique a master chef uses, and it's perfectly
reasonable that for my experience levels two tools might be better than one.

I have a bread knife, and typically the serrations on a bread knife are
spread out much wider than what you see on a utility knife. It's perfect
for cutting something soft, like bread.

The application that brought this all to mind today was I had a thick piece
of 100% cacao I wanted to cut cleanly. This thing was two inches thick and
would not cleanly break by hand. Chopping it just created a lot of
destruction and a mess. The cacao shattered into 100 small pieces. The
micro-serrated utility knife I own would have taken 10 minutes to slice
through it. The bread knife made no progress on it at all. The chef's
knife went right through it, but it required an uncontrolled forceful
movement down that brought a very sharp knife right into the cutting surface
at high force. And it also created a mess with many small pieces.

So I thought about it and just wondered if someone made a really beefy piece
of steel with many micro serrations that would let saw through something
really hard and thick. And the kind of hard thick steel with serrations I
am thinking about might actually do a decent job of cutting through thick
bones as well. I have been toying with the idea of buying large elk bones
from a vendor I use for elk meat, and then cutting those larger bones up to
use to make broth. I'm not thrilled about the idea of using a cleaver on
this, and it sure would be handy to have a blade that could laugh at a bone
of any thickness and cut it cleanly.

--
W