Have a Knife Day

I like knives.

I have a pretty wide array of knives for different tasks, but I just added one I didn't already have.

It is a mezzaluna from Cuisinart - they have a curved blade (the Inuit beat us to it with their 'ulu', used for scraping hides etc.)

It is a single blade with a curved top - they come in double blade with or without two handles, for rocking across herbs and such. Does anyone else use these regularly? My wife wouldn't laugh as much at my knife acquisitiveness if I could report that others thought they were useful too.....

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I have one, and I like it, but I very rarely dig it out of the cupboard. Sorry. (My kitchen involves way too much climbing on countertops and Tower of Hanoi maneuvering already.)

[Jenise]

I have a very wide mezzaluna only for cutting pizza. A smaller one wouldn't interest me, I'm VERY fast and efficient with a knife, and I'm sure I can chop parsley at twice or four times the speed that this thing would.

I use my Chinese cleaver for this task.

-Paul W.

When you are cutting flexible/soft herbs, just bringing an edge down on some may not cleave them in two but simply make an impression without sundering the twain - crushing rather than severing. I find that the rolling motion of the blade is more efficient in resulting in a complete severance (oops - that language flashed me back to family law for an instant....)

On the pizza front, I have a 10" high carbon steel Sabatier chef's knife that I use and I much prefer it to the roller style of pizza cutter, but then we tend t make smaller sized pizzas than .some so the roller style might be better if we used a 12" pan.

Spent a half hour yesterday tuning up my three sizes of Sabatier on the water stone. They were pretty sharp before but now they are back to razor sharp and the difference in use/feel is considerable. When you can take the end of the handle of the knife in two fingers, and just pull it across something without exerting any pressure except the weight of the knife, and it slices, it is sharp! (Only works with a larger knife with some weight of course).

Does anyone else use these regularly?

Not regularly, but I've got one with 2 handles I bought for chopping mint for mint sauce. I only use it in spring and early summer before my mint goes manky.

I used to rock a knife over the mint, but the tool is faster - I can get a nice see-saw action with a handle on each end.