Milk Street Nakiri
Special advance sale price of $59.95 (48% off) for a limited time only. Knives ship May 1, 2023.
What if we told you there is a Japanese knife specifically designed for vegetable prep that will make your cooking safer, easier and faster? It is vastly better than the all-purpose European chef’s knife, which is clunky, heavy and too thick to precisely slice and dice onions, cut carrots into perfect coins or reduce chard into feathery ribbons. The solution is the Milk Street Nakiri. It’s light, thin and sharp, with a design that resembles a mini cleaver—2 inches deep with a squared-off tip. A very thin blade, just 1.6 millimeters at the top, tapers down even thinner toward the end so it slices through even tough ingredients effortlessly without bending. The broad blade shields your fingers when you chop and works as a bench scraper to transfer chopped veggies to the simmering pot. With the help of veteran industrial designer David Lewin, we added a few special touches. The blade is embossed with a nonstick file pattern that replicates the kourochi (blacksmith) or tshuchime (pear skin) finish to traditional nakiris, so sliced ingredients fall right off. A gentle curve accommodates fingers when choking up tight for control, and the handle has been designed to provide a nonslip grip.
Milk Street Kitchin-Kiji
The one kind of knife missing from most Western kitchens is one of the most used in Japan—a midsized, multipurpose utility knife bigger and stronger than a paring knife but smaller and more manageable than a chef’s knife. Why Western cooks typically don’t have such a knife is beyond us, so we took months to design our own. The result is the Kitchin-kiji—the ultimate all-purpose utility knife that will speed up your prep. It’s perfect for all the “in-between” jobs, small enough for detailed handwork like slicing garlic and shallots, trimming mushrooms or cutting fruit. Plus, we designed it with a broad blade to be large enough that it won’t twist, and the larger handle fills the hand for a confident grip.
Milk Street Funayuki All-Purpose Prep Knife
Once an essential tool of Japanese fisherman, the funayuki (literally “boat-going knife”), is designed as the original do-it-all knife for fish, meats and vegetables. The 6½-inch long, leaf-shaped blade is tall enough to safely chop through large amounts of ingredients at one time like a cleaver, yet it tapers quickly to a fine tip for precision tasks. The strongly arced blade and forward stance excels at cutting meats, though it minces and rock chops vegetables equally well. The curve extends the blade length for cleaner slicing in a compact package.
Milk Street Santoku
A safer and more effective all-purpose kitchen knife than the triangular European-style chef’s knife, the Japanese santoku is the ultimate kitchen tool for the home cook. Our exclusive Milk Street-designed santoku (which translates as “3 virtues”) features a 7-inch blade that is tall at the heel and retains a nearly continuous height to the tip thanks to the rounded sheepsfoot tip. That means there’s plenty of blade steel to protect your fingers when chopping, and it also works well for scooping up chopped vegetables to transfer to the skillet or mixing bowl.
The blade features a pronounced curve to the belly for easy rock chopping and mincing, while the pointed tip makes it all-purpose enough for prepping meats or mincing onions, garlic and shallots.
The comfortable “lock in” ergonomic handle, fashioned from durable matte-finished polymer, is broad at the top and narrows to the bottom for a palm-filling grip. It doesn’t twist or turn during heavy-duty use. The handle tapers towards the blade for a comfortable transition between handle and blade—a benefit that few knives take into account.
The heel of the bolsterless blade is scalloped, which makes the knife comfortable to choke up on for a controlled, confident pinch grip. And a patch of file pattern embossed into the blade adds even more grip between the thumb and pointer finger.
Milk Street Kitchin-tan™ Japanese-Style Utility Knife
When a chef’s knife is too big, and a paring knife is too small, the Milk Street Kitchin-tan is the perfect pinch hitter. We borrowed elements from our favorite Western- and Japanese-style knives to create this all-purpose utility knife. From making sandwiches to chopping herbs, dicing shallots and cutting fruit, this 5½-inch blade will become the go-to knife for all of your between jobs. It has a comfortable grip, cuts like a dream and has a curved sheepsfoot tip, which makes the knife safer to use.
Milk Street Kitchin-tan™ Serrated Japanese-Style Utility Knife
The serrated Milk Street Kitchin-tan utility knife will be the most useful knife in your kitchen. It’s a pinch-hitting wonder that spans the gap between a chef’s knife and paring knife. It’s long enough for many big tasks, but small enough for detail work. We’ve taken the proven shape and functionality of the Kitchin-tan and added a maintenance-free serrated edge. The grippy razor teeth effortlessly slice though anything and everything: thick-skinned tomatoes and peppers, fibrous broccoli stems and asparagus stalks, rubbery citrus peels. You’ll be amazed at how often you use this knife.
Milk Street Kitchin-to™ Knife
Standard chef’s knives are big and heavy because they evolved from Middle Ages daggers, which were designed for defense. It stabs fine, but how well does it handle standard kitchen tasks such as chopping and slicing? Our solution was to look toward Japan, where knives are based on the design of the featherweight samurai sword. Japanese knives are thinner and designed for the task at hand. Based on these lighter, safer knives and our own cooking experience, we developed an all-new modern chef’s knife that’s remarkably easy to use. It’s the Milk Street Kitchin-to, part Chinese cleaver and part vegetable knife. It can handle small jobs such as slicing garlic but also makes heavy-duty jobs a breeze. With the Kitchin-to, you let the knife do the work!
Milk Street Tri-Edge Knife
The typical bread knife tears its way through loaves and mashes tomatoes to pulp. So we spent months re-engineering the bread knife from the ground up, testing competitors’ knives to learn what we wanted and discarding what we didn’t. The result, the *Milk Street Tri-Edge Bread Knife*, perfectly handles it all, slicing easily through any style of bread, delicate pastries, overstuffed sandwiches and tough tomatoes. It is also the perfect knives for doing difficult tasks such as chopping nuts and chocolate, handling dried fruit, and cutting up large blocks of butter.
Turkish Zirh Butcher’s Knife
When traveling in Istanbul, Chris Kimball saw chefs using stunning “zirh” knives as comfortably as if they were using a chef’s knife to efficiently mince meat and vegetables. This impressive Turkish knife gets even the most painstaking jobs done in a flash, thanks to its large, curved blade. Use the 3-inch deep blade, which looks like a saber, by rocking it back and forth through a mound of vegetables, meat or herbs. The rocking motion is Turkish chefs’ secret for perfectly uniform chopped meat, peppers and onions for kebabs, with just the right texture—and much less effort.
Tojiro Stainless Steel Chinese-Style Cleaver
Every kitchen should have a Chinese-style cleaver, whose tall, heavy-duty blade and forward-heavy balance do most of the work for you when chopping big batches of vegetables and mincing meats or herbs. We found an excellent model from Japanese producer Toryumon that, unlike most flat-bellied cleavers, has a slightly curved edge similar to a European-style chef’s knife, so American home cooks will find it easier to use. Roughly 7 inches long and 3.5 inches tall, the blade is smaller and more approachable than other models and ideal for those with smaller hands.
Milk Street Kitchin-To™ & Kitchin-Tan™ Charcoal Set
These are the only two knives you’ll need in your kitchen. The utility-sized Kitchin-tan strikes the perfect balance between a paring knife and a chef’s knife. We were inspired by Japanese petty knives, which are commonly used as the go-to knife for smaller tasks around the kitchen, but we added many signature design touches as well, including a file pattern on the blade for a better grip, a unique “lock-in” handle made of micarta (a linen/resin mixture that is grippy even when wet) and a safe rounded-tip knife blade of German 1.4116 steel, a high-quality alloy that holds an edge, resists corrosion and is easily sharpened. Using this knife feels like cutting through butter—it makes cooking fun! It even makes a great sandwich knife.
And the Kitchin-to combines the thin blade of a Japanese vegetable knife and the satisfying heft of a Chinese cleaver. The goal was to design a knife that feels good in the hand, gives you total control of the blade from heel to tip—whether slicing garlic, chopping parsley or cutting through butternut squash like it were butter. We traveled to knife shows, scoured kitchen shops around the country, quizzed home cooks and studied how our cooking school students slice, dice, chop and mince. We then worked with knife-makers and an industrial designer to realize our design. We went through numerous iterations of blade shapes, thicknesses, grinds, weights and handles before reaching what we believe is the perfect knife for all-around kitchen use.
