Ask any chef or cook what their most important tool is, and they'll all answer the same. "Knives". Well, except for Guy Fieri, who will answer his Jimmy Buffett Margaritaville combination margarita maker, popcorn machine, and panini press, if he's being honest. But even Guy is shilling his own branded knives these days, so he probably won't be honest.

So, if knives are so goddamned important, why has it taken me a good six months to post about them? I'll tell you why. They were unpresentable. Have been for months. They've desperately needed to be taken in for sharpening, which finally happened last week. Of course, I didn't get them back until Sunday, on account of them needing the really good knife person to come in to Kitchen Window and deal with them, and that expert wasn't in until Saturday. And even then, it took them half an hour per knife.

I... have some issues with proper knife care.

I attribute this to the fact that I learned to cook, and cooked for over a decade, with what may be the shittiest possible knife. A lightweight, stamped, "always sharp" knife that I got from fucking Lechter's, a now-defunct mall kitchen store, in a plastic block that came with like ten other knives plus plastic utensils. For, I believe, forty bucks. It had those mini-serrations along the knife blade that cheap knives have to simulate an edge. It sucked, but, and this was key for me in later years when it mattered, it sucked CONSISTENTLY. Pick any point in time, fast forward sixteen monhs, and the knife hadn't deteriorated toany extent that mattered. I was used to it. 

Then I got my Shuns. 8" chef's, 6" utility. From the Alton's Angle line, partly because I trust AB even when he's getting his name stamped on equipment, and partly because I have the kind of hands for which the angled handle was intended. And for the first time in my cooking life, I understood "let the knife do the work". Which is nice, because I am a lazy bastard. But unfortunately, I am also a lazy bastard.

The first nine months saw the blades get nicked at strange, regular intervals. I eventually attributed this to putting them on a metal drying rack. I know, all you knife fiends out there just had your balls or ball-equivalents pucker and draw up into your chest cavity at the thought of such a thing, but it's what I did. After that, I always hand-dried them and put them straight into the knife holder. But I was still bad about putting them in the sink for washing. Oh, most of the time, I thought I was being careful, putting them in so that they wouldn't bump up against stuff, but the blades stil got nicked all to fuck. Hence the laborious struggles of the Kitchen Window knife dude/dudette, who I have to say did a wonderful job.

And it's a good thing they did. If you'll notice the pork-heavy Sunday I referenced in the Twitter feed, what it boiled down to was this. I didn't have quite enough pork shoulder for the amount of char siu I wanted to make. So, during the same errand run where I picked up my knives, I also hit Cub for a pork shoulder. But all they had were "picnic roasts". I don't know what the fuck "picnic roast" means, but in practice, it meant a hunk of pork shoulder that still had fucking pig skin on it. And needed about sixty percent of the mass, including that skin, a ton of fat, and a big chunk of bone, removed before I could use it. But I had freshly sharpened knives, and that pork never knew what the fuck hit it.

In maybe fifteen minutes, I'd peeled the meat from the bone and the skin from the meat, and come out the other side with four nice strips for the Chinese barbecue, plus about a pound of chunks for a stew of pork and rutabaga (onion, garlic, celery, rutabaga, potato, browned pork, stock, rosemary, thyme, white wine) for dinner and a couple of lunches. I love those knives, even if I have in the past shown that love in a somewhat Ike Turnery fashion. But I've changed, really. This time it'll be different.