I lost three fingers watching this video.
You'll be wanting the KnifeStop™, then.
Ultrasonic Chef's Knife
221–230 of 697 posts
Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife
#222Ultrasonic knives have been available for non-food uses for a long time. They are useful in certain narrow applications, such as cutting leather or some plastics. That said, they come with two big caveats. First, if you push them into any harder material, the edge is destroyed almost immediately because of the micro-scale "jackhammer" action. So, hit that avocado pit and the knife is probably cooked. Second, the cons…
Sourdough can actually be a pain to cut without making a giant mess of the crust
Please tell me it was an intentional pun with the word for bread in French: pain.
Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife
#223Elsewhere 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: https://seattleultrasonics.com/pages/knife-database One thing I notice here i…
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…
Damn, I was set to completely dismiss this as entirely useless overcomplication but making stuff not stick to the knife would be nice.
Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife
#224As an aside, this feels very familiar as a sci-fi weapon, does that ring a bell for anyone? I was thinking William Gibson first but I can't place it there.
This could be the exemplar prototype for Dune knives that can penetrate a Holtzman Shield. Also recall in Dune there is an aversion to technology, so the simplicity and required human operation is a perfect fit.
Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Say more? I'd love to see a takedown of this, but this isn't one. QVC does not appear to sell this product, nor would its performance differ whether or not QVC did.
QVC might not be a well written takedown of it, but he’s right that you don’t need an electronic knife. My first job was at a knife shop so I’ve seen everything from stamped steel fantasy nonsense to traditional style hand forged items. There’s a lot that goes into making a good knife and you don’t need to spend a lot to get one. Similarly you can spend a lot of money for marginal to no benefit. In general a hard edg…
Literally everything you've said is about regular knives. You haven't said a thing about ultrasonic knives. So I'm not sure what you're trying to argue?
Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is nonsense and your cynicism is unwarranted. I personally know Scott. He's worked on food tech in Seattle for decades, and developed the product and fundraised for Seattle Ultrasonics locally. Ultrasonic knives are historically large footprint devices used in commercial/industrial food prep. The innovation here is making ultrasonic hardware compact enough to fit in the knife handle.
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What?
Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife
#227Earlier quoted context omitted.
They actually had an industrial design studio come up with the design. It isn’t white labeled “Alibaba junk” and to my eyes, it doesn’t resemble that either. > I've got knives that I've had for over 20 years that perform as well as this thing appears to (in the slick prepared advertisement). You have knives that can not have potatoes stick without scallops in the blade? Or that can atomize lemon drops? Or that can cu…
> Or that can cut through bread easily without a serrated edge? Yes. Absolutely. IME a quality sharpened chefs' knife is far better at cutting bread cleanly than a serrated knife, which by contrast will leave a rough edge and loads of crumbs.
That is not my experience.
If you try to cut through a croissant, the amount of pressure needed will often crush the croissant before slicing through (though it depends on the type of croissant).
Meanwhile, while you can use a chef's knife to cut through a crusty baguette, as it's strong enough not to collapse, you need to apply so much pressure that it's not as safe -- the blade can slip to either side over the hard irregular surface. A serrated knife requires vastly less pressure and is therefore much safer.
Yes a serrated knife can leave a rough edge and crumbs, but that's better than smooshing something entirely or cutting your hand because the knife slipped.
Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife
#228I love these inventor stories, as the Chef's Knife does towards the end of the video. Another great one is Springfree trampolines, from NPRs How I Built This:
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/27/1031732394/springfree-trampol...
Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife
#229This is a QVC product with the name of a US tech city slapped on it. Signed, a guy living nearby the home of QVC in a decidedly non-tech area of the US. Ps. don’t buy future e-waste kitchen ware unless you have accessibility reasons. You can get a good-enough victoronix 8” chef knife for $65 (I paid $36 a long time ago) and a world class chef knife for less than $250.
i don't think they slapped seattle on it because of tech connotations.
i think they slapped seattle on it because of the Seattle Supersonics, their old NBA team that still has a cult following
Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 J…
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 techn…
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.