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Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

seattleultrasonics.com

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Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#331

Post by DannyBee »

Taek wrote: post #243

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-w…

Overall agree it seems cool, and maybe interesting.

"People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives,"

The former, totally agree - i've seen people buy a tormek to do basic knife sharpening (not grinding), which is like swatting a fly with an $800 hammer.

The latter, do you mean overall, or in a sitting or what?

I've certainly seen people on various forums go nuts, and then you have hertzmann staring at knife edges with an SEM, but even if i did it completely by hand with shaptons, it takes like 15 minutes, max, to sharpen 10 knives, through an entire insane grit progression (which i do for plane blades when i need to cleanly slice end grain without going to a super high-angle plane or something. For knives, i was just trying to get a comparison point, i use electric sharpeners in practice).

Or approximately 2 minutes with an electric knife sharpener.

While sure, there is a difference when i put them under my digital inspection microscope, either can slice paper towel cleanly and easily (slicing paper is easy, slicing paper towel ends to be hard because any burr catches really easily)

Are there really even semi-normal people out there spending hours to sharpen knives?

If so, like, why?

(Obviously, again, if they need to be reground because you knicked it really badly, sure that takes a bit, but beyond that)

None of these steels are tough enough to require all that many strokes (it's pretty easy to test it with a marker and see when you remove the marking), and if you are using super custom steels (RIP Crucible :(), carbide, or ceramics, you need CBN or diamond anyway, but the same is still true - given the correct abrasive material, sharpening knives is just not that slow.

I actually travel with an electric knife sharpener if we are going to be staying in an airbnb somewhere for >1 week and are cooking most nights. It's the most consistent thing about airbnb - no matter what level of luxury, etc, they always have many knives, and all of them are dangerously dull. It still doesn't take more than a few minutes to sharpen them all.

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#332

Post by tptacek »

cwong430 wrote: post #294
tptacek wrote: post #96

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: https://seattleultrasonics.com/pages/knife-database One thing I notice here i…

The lower the better on the Food Cutting Rank

Yes, I get how the scale works, just not why I should take that scale more seriously than sharpness x edge retention.

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#333

Post by goopypoop »

horacemorace wrote: post #126
rkagerer wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not obvious at first in the video, but they pre-cut a flat base into the plum to stabilize it on the table, and are cutting in at a slightdownward angle. I feel like you could make nearly the same shot with a regular knife. Tricks like this (and the deliberate filming angles to obscure those details) make the video seem disingenuous and come across akin to a snakeoil sales pitch, which detracts from my genuine i…

Ultrasonic cheese wire is an awesome companion idea!

or a sonic cheese wire for chirping cheery tunes while chopping chunks of cheese

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#334

Post by fooker »

temp0826 wrote: post #328
mckn1ght wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

Maybe instead of building it into the knife, it needs to be something you could attach to any knife

That's a pretty good idea.

If this was a small 40$ attachment you could put on the dull edge of any knife, this would be great.

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#335

Post by mminer237 »

oofbey wrote: post #248
niccl wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fastest button mashing record appears to be 16 Hz, so I definitely do not believe it is possible to chop with a knife in the double digits.

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#336

Post by peteforde »

I recently backed NeoBlade, which is an ultrasonic multi-blade cutting device for crafters. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hozodesign/neoblade

TL;DR it's really freaking cool, though the blades do seem to get dull fairly quickly. That said, they are made of a radically different grade of steel.

If the tech in the NeoBlade has been adapted successfully to the chef's knife, then all of the haters are going to sound like all of the early "you don't need an air fryer" pundits who totally missed the point and were clearly wrong.

Also, all of the "why would I care if I can aerosolize citrus" commenters have clearly never worked in a cocktail bar. Which isn't a knock; this is Hacker News, after all. Just know that there are people who make fancy drinks who would pay a lot to be able to do this easily. If you are the sort of person who spends time thinking about clear ice, you don't need this explained to you.

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#337

Post by sublinear »

wisty wrote: post #246

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…

It has nothing to do with how good the marketing is especially when the product is so obviously only applicable for niche use.

I think we all had very similar thoughts to yours, but just came to the opposite conclusion.

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#338

Post by raldi »

CarVac wrote: post #321

The only actual benefit I find it has over a well-maintained sharp chef knife is the non-stick aspect, which looks really nice but not $300 nice IMO. Most people don't sharpen their knives enough and therefore they have to expend a lot of effort to sharpen them. If your knife is only slightly dull it takes 10 seconds to resharpen it, unlike if you've gotten the edge all folded over and such.

But as you say, most people don’t do that. So “the only actual benefit” is something of value to most people.

Re: Ultrasonic Chef's Knife

#340

Post by [deleted] »

ramraj07 wrote: post #327
gurgeous wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Rand's video he does an "old" lime, mozzarella, and a shallot. It's just a quick vid he did in like five minutes but it shows some prep. Rand is a prolific amateur chef... https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7374472... Disclaimer: I've enjoyed many delicious meals at Rand's table

If thats the actual best demonstration thats not good at all. Like either he is the worst cook ever or the knife is actually difficult to go down straight with..

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