Ultrasonic Chef's Knife
Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago
seattleultrasonics.comTechstoryHigh profile
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Ultrasonic KnifeKitchen GadgetsInnovation
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Ultrasonic Knife
Kitchen Gadgets
Innovation
The Ultrasonic Chef's Knife is a new kitchen gadget that uses ultrasonic vibrations to aid in cutting, sparking a lively discussion on its practicality, usefulness, and potential drawbacks.
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That one use would be anything but dull though
Even more interesting alternative is to have some quick blade switching machinery to switch on-the-fly between the actual blade edge and the shaped charge array and to add some feeding machinery of shaped charges into the array (and to have some stretch-shaped charges instead of the rounded ones)
Time until vibroswords, vibroaxes, vorpal blades, ect...
Lightsaber would be different because doesn’t have a blade to guide.
If you’re pushing down with hard force, it basically doesn’t matter if the knife is sharp anymore, it’ll just chop your finger off. However, with an extremely fine cut, it will be much easier to reattach, as the edges will match up well. With a dull knife, you’re not slicing, you’re more tearing your way through something.
Also, while it's true that dull knives are in some ways more dangerous than properly maintained ones, that doesn't mean safety increases monotonically with sharpness. I sharpen my kitchen knives every weekend and I'm perfectly capable of achieving an edge I could comfortably shave with, but I deliberately don't (I skip the highest-grit step and leather stropping needed for that) because it's not optimal for the vast majority of cooking tasks. The only thing that happens regularly in my kitchen that needs razor sharpness is scoring the top of a sourdough loaf, and my wife uses actual razor blades for that.
This strikes me as more of a competitor to electric carving knives than something I'd want to replace a standard chef's knife with. It looks like it needs to be used with very great care.
Thin slicing frozen meat for instance, carving pumpkins, cutting bones etc.
The shot of the scale showing force as they cut through a tomato was more compelling. I notice after the initial breach, when the knife is about halfway through, the forces are equal again. I assume that's due (at least in part) to friction between the inside of the tomato and the wide, side of the blade. Do they make a skinnier vibro-blade, or something like an ultrasonic cheese cutting wire?
edit: https://youtu.be/cXjbSVt9XNM
Wha? I tapped the little diagonal expandy-arrows in the top corner and it went full screen.
Clearly, this product is not intended for the mass market, and may find purchase with people who have tennis elbow and who can afford it, etc. <insert other critiques about practicality and applicability here>. But still, when was the last time someone tried to re-invent something as basic as a knife?
A year ago? This one is designed for woodworkers.
https://www.bourbonmoth.com/shop/p/the-bourbon-blade-origina...
This one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gqi2cNCKQY
Debunking: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtU3bYyCtA
Uh, really? I haven't been following him for a while, so I don't absolutely know if you're wrong, but I absolutely can see him joking about it and maybe even taking it too far.
HOZO NeoBlade Wireless Ultrasonic Cutter
It's from a kickstarter.
Still won't buy one but still.
Get a good steel knife, learn how to sharpen it properly, and you're set for life.
They are really not that hard, especially if they come with the bit with the right angle.
That’s quite rude and unnecessary.
To answer the question, there is an infinite number of things I can do with my time. Learning that particular manual skill, especially when there is a very simple alternative, just doesn’t seem worthwhile to me.
Just don't use a sharpener with the carbide v-blades that shave off slivers of metal or you'll get a knife with a concave edge that doesn't meet the board along the whole length and that really is a pain to fix (related note on that, a kitchen knife edge up in a vice is quite a disconcerting thing!).
Sharpening knives is quite the therapeutic process, at least it was for me when I learned to do them. Now I can sharpen knives at the bottom of a tea cup or even a brick.
Also I'd not use a soaking whetsone {anymore} (my spouse resents them for being that messy).
Like holy shit, I'm just going to pay someone a few dollars to do it because I don't want to bother sorting out all of the contradictory advice!
It's a cool idea, and I hope it is commercially successful, but not for me.
Those who are interested in knives would be able to get a more impressive knife for $399. And they are usually the type of people that enjoy sharpening a knife until it cuts better than this ultrasonic knife ever will.
This is a product which is targeted at people who don't really know a lot about knives and prep their meals with a dull blade.
I know the handle itself is integral to the ultrasonic function, but it reminds me of a cheap kitchen thermometer.
For comparison, 'analog' knives are much nicer looking for sometimes far cheaper.
Here's a $309 knife by Miyabi (which is owned by Zwilling): https://cutleryandmore.com/products/miyabi-birchwood-chefs-k...
You can even find down-market knives by the same company that have the similar steel with different finishing:
https://cutleryandmore.com/products/miyabi-mizu-sg2-chefs-kn...
https://cutleryandmore.com/products/miyabi-kaizen-ii-chefs-k...
https://cutleryandmore.com/products/miyabi-evolution-chefs-k...
If the knife we’re discussing was sub $100 I’d have no issue with AUS-10/440C, but we’re talking about a $400 knife.
Some steels might work better with ultrasonics than others.
I would like to see a ceramic version.
Those are just two examples of premium steels that would be superior to AUS-10 in every way. Additionally, as I already mentioned, you'd expect a knife that is $400 to be beautiful too. It really feels like the design element was left out of this knife. I'm sure the handle has many practical elements, but there has to be something that could be done to make it look more visually appealing.
I'm not hyping the product. I keep a knife set up to easily slice tomatoes, and if I don't want to clean it carefully afterwards I just use a good thin serrated bread knife. I'm still not really sure what this knife is "for". But I'm also not ruling out that it is "for" something interesting.
https://www.tumblr.com/weputachipinit
I’m a decent home cook with decent knife skills and i take my knives to a sharpener from time to time, I have tech job salary, I preordered. Seems neat.
I don't think the parent was bragging about the salary thing - a lot of the other comments here are mentioning the price (which to be fair, is definitely in the expensive gadgets/toys bucket...) so he/she (s/g) is saying - he's just a home cook, he's got semi-decent knife skills, and he's in a position that he can afford this.
And let's be honest, tech geeks are basically the target demographic for this sort of thing - as are half the gadgets on Kickstarter. Yes - we can talk all we want about carbon credits, and eWaste, and doing things the old fashioned homestead way when men were men, took cholera and dysentry on the chin, and knew how to use a whetstone, or to whistle (I can do one of those things...)...
I am sorely tempted, and I'm an amateur cook at best...if even that. And truthfully, this probably won't make my food better than a $15 IKEA knife (assuming I just replace those regularly). But it may make the process more enjoyable. And the tech is cool...
Independent. Reviews. People with knife skills. Some degree of communications ability would be nice, too.
if you used a knife to actually slice the tomato instead of chopping it, you'd get a much different force result.
not to say there's no benefit here, but def feels intentionally exaggerated.
also, i wonder how fast this blade will wear if you ever accidentally pressed the edge into the cutting block. my guess is that it will wear much faster.
I’d still never get one because I love my knives (and zen out hard when sharpening for an hour or two), but the push is literally the goal here.
i was just saying they compare it to normal knives being used incorrectly.
I definitely did notice that the video didn't show any bulk prep work: a clean cut through a single product is not nearly as interesting to me as how cleanly and quickly I can work through a couple onions.
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.
With that all you need to do is pretty much go back and forth. Note that the whetstone eventually wears them out too.
Something to grab while you're at it, is a truing stone to take care of the whetstone as it _will_ wear out unevenly making the sharpening a pain.
Biggest advantages is that you don't need to pre-soak them and diamond stones don't develop a valley / have to be flattened.
if you plan on getting into sharpening I would just start with a coarse, fine, and extra fine diamond stone and a leather strop w/ stropping compound.
Properly maintaining a knife does. Most people don't need to properly maintain a knife. You can do it good enough with a honing steel and some crappy automatic sharpener.
I enjoy cooking good food for my family and myself, but cooking is not a hobby of mine. So if my knife can slice a tomato without crushing it, then that's good enough for me. I don't need to shave a tomato so thin that the slice is transparent.
Does the crappy automatic sharpener work? Well the knife cuts better after I use it, so yes, it does.
Way outside the price range I'd consider personally but I look forward to having one in 5 years at a hopefully lower price point
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