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Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

seattleultrasonics.com

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Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#241

Post by its-summertime »

ricardobeat wrote: post #195
asah wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my new favorite kitchen gadget is small deli slicer, $75 on amazon. minor pain to clean, but MUCH faster than a knife, totally safe (pusher keeps fingers away from the blade) and you get precise thickness cuts every time, which means they cook precisely too. Especially good for vegetables like potatoes, onion, eggplant, etc.

Is it worth the cleaning hassle? I often avoid using a mandolin or food processor just because cleaning my knife is so much easier.

for firm things its fine, clean the moment the work is done and it shouldn't be much effort, and having nice consistent slices feels good too

For anything other than ideally firm things, the cleanup can be a nightmare

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#242

Post by derefr »

ash_091 wrote: post #181
SilverElfin wrote: post #144

Earlier 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.

Have you ever tried a bread knife with so-called "micro-serrations" (really something like ~0.5mm tooth depth / pitch)?

The one I have seems to cut just as cleanly as a chef's knife once within a material, but has better ability to bite into material at the start of a cut, when a chef's knife would be slipping off. (Think: a freshly-baked loaf of high-sugar bread, where the outside is relatively stiff, but the inside is so soft that the outside tries to "squish away" from a non-serrated slice.)

I would never use it for dicing, but it's oddly goot at e.g. slicing watermelon.

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#243

Post by Taek »

I'm a bit surprised to see how much snark there is in the comment sections of this video. The requests for "let's see an independent chef use this knife to do real kitchen work" make total sense, but the moralizing around e-waste and losing fingers etc feels off balance.

People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives, of course there's a viable market for sharper kitchen knives. And for e-waste, you are never going to make meaningful progress by telling consumers to feel bad for buying fun things. The problem is so much bigger than that, the energy is better spent in a different place.

This is a cool and novel tool, at least as far as its genuine utility can be verified. It doesn't seem harmful to let people get excited about it.

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#244

Post by kmoser »

bombela wrote: post #220
happyopossum wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cannot be made full screen Wha? I tapped the little diagonal expandy-arrows in the top corner and it went full screen.

No such button on my screen. Android v14, Firefox.

Even worse on Firefox/Windows: play button doesn't activate when clicked

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#246

Post by wisty »

Why is it people here seem so unusually sceptical?

It's expensive (but not really, only compared to knives - a $500 GPU isn't expensive). It's probably mostly good in certain niches and using a $10 knife that's sharpened properly is probably 95% as good in almost every application, and using a $10 knife that is only reasonably well sharpened is probably 90% as good. Slicing stuff for hotpot or yakiniku or Korean BBQ is what I thought of when I saw the ad, while for a lot of things it's probably not worth it. But a lot of stuff is like that - good in a niche, OK elsewhere, and there's always a cheaper option that's more flexible and almost as good even in the niche.

I feel like hn is upset by the lack of marketing. This looks like a direct sales ad that you'd get on Facebook, rather than the hype research marketing that mostly targets the b2b types who mostly dwell here? The marketing isn't the kind of marketing they normally get targeted by, so they notice it's marketing?

I notice this on other forums. If marketing isn't slick and well targeted, people get upset and suspicious because it's marketing. But functionally, they're not upset because it's marketing (almost everything is), they're upset because it's not enough marketing, and functionally they want more marketing that targets them better.

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#247

Post by jorvi »

knifemaster wrote: post #216
tptacek wrote: post #202

Earlier 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…

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 :)

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#248

Post by oofbey »

niccl wrote: post #205
condiment wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#250

Post by Hikikomori »

xxs wrote: post #188
brandall10 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out Japanese knives. The Tojiro DP I got for an inflation adjusted $75 is a dramatically better knife than that Victorinox.

One note on high quality and carbon Japanese knives - they are way harder to sharpen, also usually come with 17 degrees apex. Higher HRC would retain the sharp edge for longer, of course - but again much harder (literally) to sharp them.

VG10 in Tojiro DP is stainless steel, and even stainless goes up to 64+ HRC.
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