Elsewhere on the thread I pointed out that I'd noticed the video doesn't show anybody doing actual prep; making an easy but deliberate thin slice of a tomato is one thing, quickly dicing an onion or a bell pepper is a very different thing.
To that observation I'd add (h/t my Slack friends) this interesting site Seattle Ultrasonics stood up:
One thing I notice here is that Japanese knives (and my trusty MAC) fare really well on the BESS and CATRA scale, but relatively poorly on the "Food Cutting Rank", which is based on an ad-hoc seeming performance scale of how well their robot fared with a bunch of cutting tests that included stuff like bread and cheese (h/t again Slack friends) --- which nobody uses a chef's knife to cut.
That's a weird scale to plot chef's knives across --- unless the purpose of building that scale was to showcase an electronic knife that does well on tasks people don't normally use chef's knives for, but maybe not as well on chef knife daily driver tasks.
A talented chef might cut vegetables at 25hz, while the blade is moving at 44khz. So whatever cutting improvement is conferred by the ultrasonic tech will certainly be applied towards fast cutting. It seems that the main benefit for fast cutting would be that food doesn't stick to the blade.
I'll cut bread with my chef's knife (amazon shun knockoff) when I want to make less of a mess. One interesting thing I noticed is that when Scott was cutting bread in the video he was cutting a croissant and no crumbs fell.
It will be interesting to see the knife in the hands of real chefs. Two things I'm curious about are whether the ergonomics of the button are good, and whether the ultrasonic action atomizes foods as they're being cut, changing the experience of cooking in some way.
I'd really like to see a citation for 25 Hz. It feels to me like a decimal point might be missing. And how does the knife moving at twice the frequency of the vegetables being cut work? do they do two complete cycles of the knife for every cut of the veges? that's not what I've seen watching cooking shows (which might not be the best thing to watch for this to be seen, of course)
25 chops per second would be EXTRAORDINARY. Possible? Probably but only with super elite training. Most competent home chefs can probably do 5 Hz and probably struggle to get to 10 Hz.
Looks like around 12Hz, counting the forward rock and back rock as distinct chops. I'm not sure a rocking motion is what people mean here, though. This only works for mincing something you've already cut up, not slicing an onion.
Maybe the solution is an ultrasonic slap chop? (https://www.amazon.com/Slap-Chop-Stainless-Vegetable-Accesso...) Many slices at once, preserve whatever the ingredient is without crushing it, doesn't stick to the blade. It may sound ridiculous, but if it makes kitchen prep easier and faster, I might cook more.
The sixteenth notes in "Crazy Train"[1] are nominally 552 per minute, or 9.2 Hz. Moving a knife at 10 Hz is probably very difficult. I would expect 2-3 Hz is a normal pace for a skilled knife user and 4-5 Hz is showing off.
That’s where a lot of mess comes from, so I’m very interested in this tech. The worst are cucumbers, they stick to the blade and new slices pop them up and they roll everywhere. I get some better results by slightly angling the blade but it’s not perfect.
The blade quality doesn’t look great but I think any decent cook that knows how to hone will do just fine with it.
I’m not sure I’d spend the money and replace my expensive knives for a relatively rare edge case but it’s a neat innovation that might catch on elsewhere, or maybe they’ll make premium lines.
Technique. Pros use a slicing motion that moves the knife through the food before it detaches, home cooks use 5% of the blade and all the cucumber rounds are stuck to same place on the side of the middle of the knife.
Interesting idea, but I would say that it is orders of magnitude harder compared to having an integrated system. Vibration in such a compact space with a very sharp blade... I want this system be stable around me.
I would say, if this idea becomes popular, knife producers can create their own versions in the new models, or retrofit old knives at the shop.
Yeah, I'm already somewhat skeptical of the whole concept, having DIY'd a vibroblade out of an X-acto knife and a SonicCare toothbrush and finding it to be completely ineffective.[1]
I think trying to make an ultrasonic vibration add-on for regular knives would be even harder to make into a useful product than an integrated knife/transducer.
If the handle is rigidly fixed to the blade, there would be very little vibration. So it seems like the only way to make an add-on would be as a sleeve over the regular handle. That would make for a bulky handle, and it seems like it would need a counterbalancing weight at the back. So the result would be very unwieldy, like one of those electric turkey-carving knives that are basically kitchen hedge-trimmers.
I'm waiting to see what skilled chefs think of this knife. The idea of an ultrasonic vibroblade has always seemed like a neat one to me, and I'd be happy to hear that someone managed to make one that was genuinely useful.
Ultrasonic cutting board. "Are you tired of spending $1800 on a whole set of ultrasonic knives only to have them break every time your Brother in law throws them in a bowl of soapy water after a dinner party? Well know you don't have to. Image buying 6 cheap knives at a garage sale and turning them into chefs quality knives instantly, without even touching a sharpener!"
if you have a nice knife and cut by dragging the knife towards you with tip in contact with the board instead of cutting directly down, food will not stick
The video comparison of this knife cutting through potato compared to a regular one is very enticing. My own experience is that there is more sticking even on my knives that have those scooped out edges that are supposed to prevent sticking.
I'm not saying it can't work, just that they didn't show it, and after the required thin-tomato-slice that's the thing I'd most want to see the knife doing.
Wh...why? I'm not selling anything. I'm just saying dicing an onion is a better test of a chef's knife than taking a single thin slice of a tomato. Seems like that's an argument you can just take on directly.
I don't think there's anything interesting about my onion dice. You'd be seeing a video of a banged up MAC, scraped up from all the times I've casually sharpened it in a hurry, doing the standard one-cross-cut Jacques Pepin onion dice. You know, an onion dice.
(The "Slack friend" thing was just that I felt bad about sharing a link I'd gotten just a few minutes while pretending as if I'd known about it myself. I have no idea their level of expertise! Probably better than mine though.)
I was getting the impression that you are "selling" the fact that the performance of this knife is based on false advertising, and using personal anecodes and some anonymous people as a supporting argument. That's basically the only issue.
Aside from that, in my opinion dicing an onion is a much more simple task for a knife than taking a very thin slice of a tomato. And in both cases it is likely more about the technique/handling and the sharpening than the actual knife material or technology. But the average person does not care about those things, so this knife could at least in principle be something useful for them. Not for someone who is willing to invest some time in the aforementioned things though, like you (and me too, for that matter).
No I genuinely don't know if this is a useful product or not. I think it would be a more interesting world if it was, so I guess I'm rooting for it. But I've got those two indications that I should be wary: nobody really used the knife in the video, and he did that weird knife ranking that happens (in a weird way) to probably favor his new electronic knife.
Well, I can't speak to "false advertising", but the thin slice he did with the tomato and the grape you can just achieve with a well-sharpened knife. Both sides of a whetstone and then a strop will get you there.
As for the sticking, this is solved by vertical fluting already.
Ultrasonic vibration is a complicated solution for a problem that has already been solved by the simple solution of just sharpening your knives. And you don't need to get expensive either. A Sharpal diamond stone, leather strop and a good workhorse knife like a Victorinox Santoku will get you there :)
He acknowledges you can do that with a well-sharpened knife. Of course you can do it with a well-sharpened knife. It's exactly the demo every single sharp knife does! His claim is that the ultrasonic knife will always do that cut, whether or not you assiduously keep it sharp, which is what I have to do with my MAC and Yuki to make it cut tomatoes like that.
But most chef-knife cutting isn't thin tomato slices, and you can always do that cut with a good thin serrated bread knife, too. I want to see it dice an onion. Seems like a small ask.
Yep, I have a Shun with micro serrations ([0]) that will slice a tomato so finely you basically feel no resistance.
The only downside is that you can’t really hone or sharpen it yourself so you have to baby it. I’ve had mine about 15 years and have sent it in one time for their free sharpening at about the 11 year mark. At least Shun blades hold their edge a really long time.
> It will be interesting to see the knife in the hands of real chefs.
Not really? I feel like this is for the other people, the folks who don't have the training to use a chefs knife super well. I'd rather see a decent home cook compare it to their knife in general prep.
"The best tools shouldn't only be accessible to the pros" but his knife costs more than every knife in that database.
The weight is listed in their help articles as 330g. I also think that handle is chunkier than a typical high end chef's knife. It may be easier to cut things with it, but I think your hand and arm are going to get tired of using it more quickly than with a regular knife at ~100g less.
And I realize these fare worse than the high end japanese and german knives, but it's hard to get excited about a $400 knife you can't put in the dishwasher when you can get a perfectly credible fibrox knife for about a tenth of that, which doesn't require charging and can tolerate 'careless home cook' levels of abuse.
You're supposed to keep a glass of water with a bit of chlorine bleach (to obtain roughly 300 ppm) handy for wiping your tools and surfaces down as you work. Not that anyone teaches Home Economics at school any longer.
This is what I learned in cooking school but also never actually saw in practice in restaurants I worked in (which were fine-ish dining in the Bay Area).
Taking a piece of metal or a plate that has any oily or other non-water-soluble food on it, rinsing it, and chlorinating it results in a mess that might indeed be non-infectious but is otherwise disgusting. Also, leaving a piece of stainless steel covered in chloride (which that bleach will turn into) is one of the worst things you could credibly do to it in a kitchen context. (And, while the relevant regulators don’t seem to care about disinfection byproducts in a kitchen, all those residual organics that didn’t get removed plus hypochlorous acid seem like they would thoroughly fail most drinking water standards.)
Also, I don’t know what all the food safety and dishwasher vendors are telling their customers, but that nice residual chlorine has a tasty and odor that is not appetizing at all. But you can also legally disinfect your dishes and such with sufficiently hot water, and you can buy a commercial dishwasher that does that instead of using chlorine.
In a home context, what’s wrong with dish soap and a sponge or brush? In a commercial kitchen that really wants to be compliant could use dish soap followed by a (very) hot rinse. The average household instant hot water tap is plenty hot for this, too, although demonstrably hitting those HACCP targets might be tricky.
I'm not disputing that, and it's kind of my point. Most home cooks (I would bet millions) are not worrying about "the cutting experience" when they are making dinner. They are using a knife to cut up vegetables or slice meat or whatever. Then they are putting that knife in the dishwasher. Not all of them, but most.
I think my other points matter more. I think people who are invested in the experience as you suggest care about more than just the edge and finish, they care about the weight and balance and feel as well. I think this knife is probably worse on those qualities.
I don't mean to say this knife sucks or that this guy is dumb. It's a cool knife, and he's clearly not dumb. I just think this is more a passion project curiosity kind of thing than a useful product addressing a large market need. Maybe a future mass market version (cheaper steel, stamped, more contoured handle) would change my mind.
> Most home cooks (I would bet millions) are not worrying about "the cutting experience"
Indeed, and they won't buy the knife at this price anyway. My point is that not being dishwasher-safe does not matter for ~everyone. If they care, they won't do it; if they don't, they won't buy it.
It's hard to do irreparable damage to the steel of a knife. It's just an inert lump of metal. But you could fuck up the handle. Theoretically, the detergent could dull your edge. If you don't isolate your knife and it rattles around, that'll definitely dull it. Mostly: it should only take a couple seconds to clean off your knife in the sink.
> It's hard to do irreparable damage to the steel of a knife.
It’s easy — just heat it above the tempering temperature of the steel in question. You can achieve this in an ordinary oven for most steels, and you can also achieve it (locally) with a motorized sharpener that isn’t cooled. Don’t take a knife you care about to be professionally sharpened by a person who uses a non-water-cooled power tool.
> It's hard to do irreparable damage to the steel of a knife.
Sadly not impossible, I've 'lost' (they're still in the back of a drawer) two good knives to idiots attempting to pry apart frozen chops and steaks .. each case snapped a good inch from the tip.
Not damage from a dishwasher and not damage the edge I realize, but worth mention as a tale of caution.
The steel used to make the knives is not always stainless, so it can stain or rust. Even stainless is really just stain resistant.
Dishwasher detergent is caustic and corrosive to steel, so over time it can pit the metal and dull the finish. Handles will swell and become loose or deteriorate, either because of wood repeatedly being waterlogged and dried or just from the heat cycling. A loose handle can be unsanitary, unsightly, dangerous, or all three.
You'll often read that knives in the dishwasher will bang around and that will damage the edge. And that it's more likely you will hurt yourself pulling a knife out of the dishwasher vs. cleaning them properly.
Phosphoric acid detergents will pit your blade. If the knife is not a stainless steel, the wash and dry cycle will cause accelerated rusting. In wooden-handled knives with a rat tail tang construction, you can start destroying the handle from the inside out due to gaps in the construction allowing water seepage and degradation. In non-stainless knives, that same construction becomes the point where rust tends to build up.
Then you also have the action of the dishwasher water jets bouncing the knife around, dulling and destroying the edge.
Only the shittiest cheapest plastic-handled knives I own touch the dishwasher. Everything else gets cleaned and wiped by hand and put straight to the knife block or its respective scabbard.
“This has all the hallmarks of a product that’s going to be disappointing but I’m so optimistic it won’t be.”
I’m seriously hopefuls it works because vibroblades (I mean, “progressive knives” and “high frequency blade”) are awesome and the timelines of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Metal Gear are getting closer. Which may, or may not be a good thing.
Well we know this tech works because there are already ultrasonic cutters in medical and industrial equipment. So it’s more about whether they implemented it well, rather than some new fundamental discovery.
I got a wired (usb-c) ultrasonic cutter for around $100 (not this one), and it's amazing for cutting precise holes on electronic project boxes (plastic / abs).
Yes think of it as a more powerful electric toothbrush. There are actually already toothbrush sized ultrasonic knives you can buy online. This just applies the same tech to what largely looks like a normal chefs knife.
Feel free to correct me if I’m off base, but it doesn’t seem like the robot is actually slicing. Looks more like it’s just mashing the blade into the tomato. In this case I can see how the vibration can make up for the lack of slicing action. Ie sliding the blade across the tomato.
My question is: would there still be an improvement if they used a slicing action?
A slight tangent but I find sharpness tests often don’t represent the experience at the macro level, but it’s easily benchmarked and quantified.
As an example are tons of people pushing Feather or Astra or similar ultra sharp shaving razors. I bought a ton of sample packs the ones I liked the most were Kai, which are considered relatively dull, but have properties which make the overall experience better (I recall reading they’re thicker and vibrate less during cutting).
To me that makes this knife cutting benchmark more attractive than sharpness or retention, but I still have questions about technique used in the benchmarks, and how that affects knife performance (e.g. I would never try to cut bread by just pressing down as this move does).
I don’t understand judging a knife by any measure of “sharpness”? Sharpness is what the sharpener brings to the knife. Edge retention is the steel, but the skills of the sharpener (against how easy the steel is to sharpen) are what defines the edge sharpness.
This is mostly just a remark on the fact that BESS is probably just measuring the factory edge… which only matters until it has dulled the first time?
Edge geometry only matters after the initial cut. BESS measures how much force it takes for the knife to cut a calibrated thread.
Carbide size maybe? But mostly I think it changes toothiness (so slicing, not push cutting). Also, I think that affects how hard or easy it is to get a given edge, but not how good the edge (as measured by BESS) can actually be.
Maybe it changed since you posted it, but right now the top 3 knives there by "Food Cutting Rank" are Japanese (Shun, Moritaka, Tojiro), with a Wuesthof coming in at 4th?
All of the Japanese brands I recognized were in the top 10 (out of 21) with the MAC being exactly in the middle.
I also noticed that while they show the traditional knives struggling to make their way through something hard like a carrot, they never show the ultrasonic knife cutting a carrot. I suspect the ultrasonic feature helps more on softer things.
Jacques Pépin suggested at [0] "basically you need three knives":
- a chopping knive, 9-12" depending on one's hand
- a utility knife for slicing, about 6"
- a paring knife, a cheaper ordinary one is fine
Of those, other than the chopping/chef's knife, I imagine that one could generally slice cheese with the utility knife (depending on the cheese, of course).
Ironically, the cheeses I would cut with a chef's knife are exactly the ones that aren't going to stick to the knife. The ones that get messy are just as easy to cut with a butter knife.
(Amusingly, butter is one of the demos in this video.)
A Santoku or other knife with scalloped sides do well. There are also in fact, cheese knifes, for cutting and serving that are popular for self service cheese boards. Wire is also popular for cutting large block cheeses.
The problems were even bigger than that - they tested factory sharpness and factory geometry that often are shit. And not thinning and sharpening them properly. Let alone that the steel on the factory edge has high chance to fatigued/softer than the rest.
I believe the thinking is serrated knives work best for things where the skin is tough, but the internal structure is weak. So crusty bread with a lot of air inside.
Also, surprisingly, tomatoes. Lots of people suggest small serrated knives (if you have them) for tomatoes.
My question for this product is entirely different: It's well-known that ultrasonic sound can still damage your hearing despite being inaudible or nearly so. Does this?
To that observation I'd add (h/t my Slack friends) this interesting site Seattle Ultrasonics stood up:
https://seattleultrasonics.com/pages/knife-database
One thing I notice here is that Japanese knives (and my trusty MAC) fare really well on the BESS and CATRA scale, but relatively poorly on the "Food Cutting Rank", which is based on an ad-hoc seeming performance scale of how well their robot fared with a bunch of cutting tests that included stuff like bread and cheese (h/t again Slack friends) --- which nobody uses a chef's knife to cut.
That's a weird scale to plot chef's knives across --- unless the purpose of building that scale was to showcase an electronic knife that does well on tasks people don't normally use chef's knives for, but maybe not as well on chef knife daily driver tasks.