Ina Garten, if I could also be so daring, you’ll all the time be well-known. Whether or not it’s for writing a powerful 13 cookbooks, reminding us that store-bought substances are “tremendous,” or making a colossal cosmopolitan for one, Ina’s affect is aware of no bounds. Her straightforward, aspirational opulence is a guiding mild for denim-shirted house cooks all over the place. And this week, Garten graced us with one other morsel of kitchen knowledge: her secret to storing knives.
In an Instagram put up, she shared that she retains her knives the wrong way up in her countertop knife block. “If you happen to put it in proper facet up—the standard means—as you set it in,” she says, “the blade is scraping in opposition to the wooden, and I don’t assume it’s good for the blade.” Storing the knives the wrong way up, Garten says, can defend the blade, and assist your knives keep sharper for longer.
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The Bon Appétit staffers had some sturdy emotions about Garten’s recommendation. We love any sneaky concept that can preserve knives from getting uninteresting, and different specialists additionally endorse this methodology. However our editors have another approaches for storage that they like over the knife block.
The most well-liked is a magnetic strip, which eliminates the potential for dulling the knife in opposition to wooden altogether. Deputy meals editor Hana Asbrink has a magnetic strip mounted to a wall in her kitchen. “I need to see my knives and guarantee they’re fully dry,” she says. Senior cooking editor Emma Laperruque additionally makes use of a wall-mounted magnetic knife strip. For her, it’s extra environment friendly. “A knife block takes up counter area, which is valuable for cooking,” she says. “A magnetic strip takes up wall area, which might in any other case go unused.”
For meals director Chris Morocco, a magnetic knife strip, even one that matches inside a drawer, is about versatile storage. A knife block can solely retailer sure knives—and also you could not even want or need those that include the block, since they’re not all the time the very best quality, as senior commerce editor Noah Kaufman factors out. “What about that deba you picked up?” Morocco asks, referring to the Japanese type of knife normally used to chop fish. “It should by no means slot in a regular block.”
It wasn’t all anti-knife block sentiment, although. Affiliate cooking and search engine optimization editor Zoe Denenberg takes a hybrid strategy, storing her inexpensive, on a regular basis knives in a countertop knife block, and maintaining her dearer, “chefy knives” sheathed in knife protectors.
If you happen to’re a kind of fortunate people who has huge stretches of accessible counter area, and you continue to end up drawn to knife blocks, there are some good choices. Some knife blocks have been redesigned to be magnetized, so you will get the perfect of each worlds.
Knife block, magnetic strip, or knife cowl—the factor the Bon Appétit group might all agree on was that any of these strategies are miles higher than no storage resolution in any respect. As Zoe put it, “Higher to have your knives in a chosen spot than jumbled in a drawer with the remainder of your kitchen crap. That’s an accident ready to occur.”
