Know Your Knife: The Japanese Core Four
The American and European kitchen has spent the better part of a century asking one or two blades to do nearly everything. Japanese cooking took the opposite view: the task dictated the shape. We think four shapes cover just about most of what a good working kitchen asks for, and we've had all four made at our forge in Sanjo City: a gyuto, a santoku, a nakiri, and a petty. The following is what each is for, and how they’ve all come to be.
THE GYUTO is the knife everything else is organized around. It is the Japanese rendition of the French chef's knife, and at 8.27 inches it has the reach to draw through a whole squash or a slice of protein in a single pass, then slice through herbs without lifting off the board.
THE SANTOKU is more of the generalist, and it earns that title by compromise where the gyuto earns it by size. Three virtues, the name means: meat, fish, and vegetables. It runs shorter, flatter, and blunter at the tip, which changes how it's used — pushed and pulled rather than rocked, the whole edge meeting the board at once. That flat profile is why a santoku leaves cleanly separated slices where a curved blade leaves the last quarter-inch hinged together. If a kitchen keeps only one knife, this is the one.
The other two are specialists, and better for it.
THE NAKIRI is a flat, rectangular piece of steel with no point and no curve, and for most of Japanese history, it was the only knife in the house: the domestic kitchen ran on vegetables long before meat returned to the table. Every inch of its edge lands at the same moment, so nothing accordion-folds and nothing stays connected at the far end. Set up a stack of chard and the work goes faster than it has any right to.
THE PETTY takes the opposite end of the range. Its name comes from the French “petit”, and it fills the gap every kitchen has between a paring knife too small to be useful and a chef's knife too large to control. Peeling in hand, segmenting citrus, splitting a shallot, trimming silverskin from a roast. Most cooks find it becomes the second knife they pick up.
THE FORGE. All four come from Sanjo City, in Niigata Prefecture on the Sea of Japan, which has been called the town of blacksmiths since the 1600s. The forge we work with opened there in 1948; we first visited them in 2015. They are one of the few forges left that still does every step under one roof. The steel is forged, ground, heat-treated, and finished in the same building by the same hands. That vertical integration is unglamorous and increasingly rare, and it is most of the reason the four knives feel like a set rather than four separate purchases.
