Bolster Knife

Knife with a bolster or without? henckels ProS or Twin Cuisine? 8″ or 10″?

i need tips to buy my new chefs knife..answers are very appreciated
im 5’8 1/2 btw..asian

A) Bolster or no. Short answer is no, despite of knife marketing claims knives w/o bolster are easier to maintain, just as safe and cheaper.

There’s 3 very common knife marketing myths

1) Knife marketers love to point out that “full bolster for balance and safety” thingy… In reality it’s rather BS. Knife balance is important, but unless it’s really weird most of the people get adjusted easily. Also, bolster is not the only way to balance the knife and it can and has been done without bolster for centuries. As for the safety, Bolsters make sense only on narrow boning knives to protect your hand from slipping down on the blade if you accidentally stab something or hit the bone, but on other wider knives blade choil area does the job, i.e. prevents your fingers from slipping down. Other than that, bolster just makes sharpening that knife a nightmare.
Take the same Henckels, their most expensive and high end line is Miyabi, and those have no bolsters. It’s just a gimmick to get the customer pay more money.

2) Forged vs. stamped – As knife marketing tells us good kitchen knives have to be forged, and have full bolster and tang. NONE of that is true. E.g. Stamped Globals are much better performers than most of the forged mainstream kitchen knives. Stamped Forschners are made from the same steels as Wusthoffs and Henckels and I’ll bet 1000$ to anyone they won’t be able to tell the difference neither in edge holding nor in cutting performance.
I bought Forged and stamped versions of the same chef’s knife from Global, specifically to compare performance, and I didn’t get anything but extra weight and spent more money on forged knife.

3) Full tang – Another BS, Katana swords and bowie knives are not full tang, yet they can cut through armor and leather, so I really doubt you need more strength than that in the kitchen.

B) As for the blade length, I’d go with longer chef’s knife. Later when you get more experienced you will appreciate extra length. You wont’ have to raise your elbow as high, compared to shorter blades when using it in rocking motion and obviously longer blade makes a better slicer too. When I was starting my kitchen collection I got 8″, then went with 9 and now I am on 270mm blades exclusively. Week ago I tried using one of the 240mm blades, felt kindda awkward for a while…

C) ProS vs. Twin Cousine – As far as the blade steel and heat treatment goes, they are identical – X50CrMoV15 steel, or its slight variation. Composition here – http://zknives.com/knives/steels/x50crmov15.shtml It’s nothing exciting these days, quite old steel.
Henckel got into habit of obscuring and concealing/renaming the alloy used in their knife, which is not a good sign.
In general when makers use a good steel in their knives they are happy to advertise and promote that. Occasional exception being super duper expensive custom made knives from mystery steels, but that’s rare. The same henckel uses ZDP-189 steel, renamed to MC66 in their miyabi knives and they’re stamping that on the blade and their marketing is advertising that fact widely…
So, that “quality high carbon steel, exclusive to Henckels” is just another name for X50CrMoV15 clone. For the record it is neither high carbon nor anything exceptional in 21st century. May be it was very good back in 1950 or so, but not today.

Finally, you might want to look into Japanese kitchen knives, specifically gyutos, which are the equivalent of western chef’s knives. You mentioned you’re asian and due to cultural traditions I guess asian folks tend to be more delicate with their kitchen knives compared to average western knife user. In that case Japanese kitchen knives are just about perfect.
Thinner and lighter than their western counterparts, generally with better quality steel and much harder at that(62-66HRC on high end knives vs. 54-56HRC on westerns). All that allows for a thinner edge (30 deg total vs 40-45 on western) and cutting ability of those knives is several times better.
Downside is increased brittleness, but that is a problem only if you whack lobsters with your chef’s knife. Keep it for designated use, e.g. soft food and veggies and it will outcut and outlast standard western knives by hefty margin.
here’s bunch of Japanese knives reviews for you – http://zknives.com/knives/kitchen/ktknv/indexjpn.shtml
Well, there’s quite a bit of western knives reviews too if you click around.

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