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.
>People spend hundreds of dollars and many hours sharpening kitchen knives...
What amazes me is how many people spend absolutely zero time sharpening knives, using decades-old knives that have never been sharpened and can't even cut through cucumbers.
I don't use knives in my kitchen. My romantic partner does. Yesterday I decided to cut some tomatoes only to find out that all knives are dull.
She never said anything, I didn't know it. Why?
Because she is just "used" to it and to her these knives were just fine. So she never thought about sharpening knives in the first place.
I will take those knives to a pro and he will sharpen them for me, as in a rental I stay in, I don't have the tools to do that and as I said in another comment - I don't have a pain free process to do that as I don't do it often.
You don't really need "tools" to sharpen knives. You just need a harder surface and some experience. It's one of those things that once you learn you can accomplish with a variety of "tools" because you're just trying to achieve an end goal. There's zero reason you can't sharpen a knife in a rental, lol. You don't need a belt grinder or anything.
People get way too caught up in buying into systems and being told how to do things because it alleviates some anxiety of trying something new. Sharpening knives hasn't really changed much in the last few centuries. Watch a few guides and learn to do it. There's no substitute for experience here. It's also a very transferable skill so it's one that used to be taught in schools but no longer is.
when I was poor I used to make pricy shaving blades last for months longer than they should have by rubbing them on some old jeans. I don’t remember where I learned it but my roommates thought I was crazy til they tried it.
I'm surprised there isn't moralizing about the price point. I don't see why the US is so far behind in manufacturing efficiency. Everything seem to be 10-100x the cost of comparable Chinese goods, and US labor isn't paid anywhere close to 100x more.
Eh, it's pretty clear this price point isn't driven by manufacturing. It's driven by being a bespoke item with tons of R&D costs that need to be recouped.
If this turns into a significant market, I'm sure the cost will plummet.
Why would manufacturing cost come into play? Isn't it a given that a company will charge as much as they can get away with charging? Cost of labor and material I understood to only matter at the absolute bottom of a highly commoditized market e.g., bolts or capacitors or whatever. This is the only consumer ultrasonic knife (as far as I know) so they can charge whatever.
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.
Most people can buy an opinel and be happy for decades. You don't need anything fancy for a general purpose knife. $50 max, and that's if you're feeling like getting something special.
Expensive steels are, by and large, incremental progress over cheaper knife steels, provided it got an appropriate heat treatment and has good edge geometry. In almost no applications will an end consumer notice the difference.
I've been using the same thrift store knife I picked up 15 years ago. It gets sharpened maybe once a year, honed every so often. It was like $20 i think? Most chefs I know have a similar story with their knife/knives, something cheap that does the job.
Spending more on knives is just status symbol nonsense, which unfortunately has infected absolutely everything. It's like spending $300 on a spanner wrench. Who in the hell spends that much on a wrench? Why would you spend that much on a knife? lol. It's what you do with it that matters.
I admire you. You are a minority, you know that, right?
I don't have time in my schedule at the moment, which says "sharpen the knifes". So for me - it would be amazing if someone solved this problem in a radical way.
Sporadically I would sharpen the knives and since I don't have it in my "skills" section of the brain, I always have to "figure out" sharpening process.
In Japan I could just drop my knife in a nearby house's box with $6, they'd sharpen it and phone me to pick it up within a few hours. Cheap enough that I never bothered to do it myself.
> I always have to "figure out" sharpening process.
Get the Worksharp fixed angle sharpener for about $70 (about the price of 2 decent stones). If you're really interested, get the leather strop add on for about $10. Get on with sharpening your kitchen knives. Put it in your closet until next year.
Is it "great"? No. If you want to be a knife nerd, it's not for you.
If you have a couple of kitchen knives you need to sharpen once a year, it's absolutely fine. And you don't have to "get the feel" of sharpening again before you can get sharp kinves.
Even with the stones and equipment I have, it is way more mindless and a lot less messy to simply use a fixed-angle sharpener. Sure, you won't get "The Ultimate Hair Whittling Edge(tm)", but your knives will quite readily Julienne your vegetables.
Reiterating that any sharpener with the ability to set the angle is really all anyone needs if they don't want to invest in the time of learning how to sharpen.
I have the ruixin version and it works fine. I like that I can use the stones without the system.
Sure. Most fixed angle sharpeners work to some degree, I just recommended one that isn't sold by "Random Letter Chinese Shop" and that I have bought and know personally works.
In addition, for the moment, the stones used in the system I recommended are reliably decent and have been analyzed by a bunch of the YouTube knife nerds. The other fixed angle systems can be hit or miss with the stones.
If someone is sufficiently interested that they want to use the stones without the system, they've started down the path to being a knife nerd and have outgrown my recommendation.
> ...you are never going to make meaningful progress by telling consumers to feel bad for buying fun things.
I think it's a worthwhile message to tell folks that we, collectively, should be mindful about the resources we consume and the waste we produce. For such razor-thin (lol) gains in QoL, I think it's worth reminding people to consider whether it is worth the huge increase in waste. Knives are metal and wood/plastic... awfully efficient tools for the work they get done.
EDIT: And to balance the negativity, I _love_ the Seattle Ultrasonics logo.
This is also make takeaway. I have noticed this more and more on this site. Everything is criticized to an insane degree. If someone hasn't solved world hunger, while at the same time making money and curing their grandma of Alzheimer it will not be received well.
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:
One thing I notice here is that Japanese knives (and my trusty MAC) fare really well on the BESS and CATRA scale, but relatively poorly on the "Food Cutting Rank", which is based on an ad-hoc seeming performance scale of how well their robot fared with a bunch of cutting tests that included stuff like bread and cheese (h/t again Slack friends) --- which nobody uses a chef's knife to cut.
That's a weird scale to plot chef's knives across --- unless the purpose of building that scale was to showcase an electronic knife that does well on tasks people don't normally use chef's knives for, but maybe not as well on chef knife daily driver tasks.
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 is that when Scott was cutting bread in the video he was cutting a croissant and no crumbs fell.
It will be interesting to see the knife in the hands of real chefs. Two things I'm curious about are whether the ergonomics of the button are good, and whether the ultrasonic action atomizes foods as they're being cut, changing the experience of cooking in some way.
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 sixteenth notes in "Crazy Train"[1] are nominally 552 per minute, or 9.2 Hz. Moving a knife at 10 Hz is probably very difficult. I would expect 2-3 Hz is a normal pace for a skilled knife user and 4-5 Hz is showing off.
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 expensive knives for a relatively rare edge case but it’s a neat innovation that might catch on elsewhere, or maybe they’ll make premium lines.
Interesting idea, but I would say that it is orders of magnitude harder compared to having an integrated system. Vibration in such a compact space with a very sharp blade... I want this system be stable around me.
I would say, if this idea becomes popular, knife producers can create their own versions in the new models, or retrofit old knives at the shop.
if you have a nice knife and cut by dragging the knife towards you with tip in contact with the board instead of cutting directly down, food will not stick
The video comparison of this knife cutting through potato compared to a regular one is very enticing. My own experience is that there is more sticking even on my knives that have those scooped out edges that are supposed to prevent sticking.
I'm not saying it can't work, just that they didn't show it, and after the required thin-tomato-slice that's the thing I'd most want to see the knife doing.
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 Jacques Pepin onion dice. You know, an onion dice.
(The "Slack friend" thing was just that I felt bad about sharing a link I'd gotten just a few minutes while pretending as if I'd known about it myself. I have no idea their level of expertise! Probably better than mine though.)
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 technique/handling and the sharpening than the actual knife material or technology. But the average person does not care about those things, so this knife could at least in principle be something useful for them. Not for someone who is willing to invest some time in the aforementioned things though, like you (and me too, for that matter).
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.
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 :)
He acknowledges you can do that with a well-sharpened knife. Of course you can do it with a well-sharpened knife. It's exactly the demo every single sharp knife does! His claim is that the ultrasonic knife will always do that cut, whether or not you assiduously keep it sharp, which is what I have to do with my MAC and Yuki to make it cut tomatoes like that.
But most chef-knife cutting isn't thin tomato slices, and you can always do that cut with a good thin serrated bread knife, too. I want to see it dice an onion. Seems like a small ask.
Yep, I have a Shun with micro serrations ([0]) that will slice a tomato so finely you basically feel no resistance.
The only downside is that you can’t really hone or sharpen it yourself so you have to baby it. I’ve had mine about 15 years and have sent it in one time for their free sharpening at about the 11 year mark. At least Shun blades hold their edge a really long time.
> It will be interesting to see the knife in the hands of real chefs.
Not really? I feel like this is for the other people, the folks who don't have the training to use a chefs knife super well. I'd rather see a decent home cook compare it to their knife in general prep.
"The best tools shouldn't only be accessible to the pros" but his knife costs more than every knife in that database.
The weight is listed in their help articles as 330g. I also think that handle is chunkier than a typical high end chef's knife. It may be easier to cut things with it, but I think your hand and arm are going to get tired of using it more quickly than with a regular knife at ~100g less.
And I realize these fare worse than the high end japanese and german knives, but it's hard to get excited about a $400 knife you can't put in the dishwasher when you can get a perfectly credible fibrox knife for about a tenth of that, which doesn't require charging and can tolerate 'careless home cook' levels of abuse.
I'm not disputing that, and it's kind of my point. Most home cooks (I would bet millions) are not worrying about "the cutting experience" when they are making dinner. They are using a knife to cut up vegetables or slice meat or whatever. Then they are putting that knife in the dishwasher. Not all of them, but most.
I think my other points matter more. I think people who are invested in the experience as you suggest care about more than just the edge and finish, they care about the weight and balance and feel as well. I think this knife is probably worse on those qualities.
I don't mean to say this knife sucks or that this guy is dumb. It's a cool knife, and he's clearly not dumb. I just think this is more a passion project curiosity kind of thing than a useful product addressing a large market need. Maybe a future mass market version (cheaper steel, stamped, more contoured handle) would change my mind.
> Most home cooks (I would bet millions) are not worrying about "the cutting experience"
Indeed, and they won't buy the knife at this price anyway. My point is that not being dishwasher-safe does not matter for ~everyone. If they care, they won't do it; if they don't, they won't buy it.
It's hard to do irreparable damage to the steel of a knife. It's just an inert lump of metal. But you could fuck up the handle. Theoretically, the detergent could dull your edge. If you don't isolate your knife and it rattles around, that'll definitely dull it. Mostly: it should only take a couple seconds to clean off your knife in the sink.
> It's hard to do irreparable damage to the steel of a knife.
Sadly not impossible, I've 'lost' (they're still in the back of a drawer) two good knives to idiots attempting to pry apart frozen chops and steaks .. each case snapped a good inch from the tip.
Not damage from a dishwasher and not damage the edge I realize, but worth mention as a tale of caution.
“This has all the hallmarks of a product that’s going to be disappointing but I’m so optimistic it won’t be.”
I’m seriously hopefuls it works because vibroblades (I mean, “progressive knives” and “high frequency blade”) are awesome and the timelines of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Metal Gear are getting closer. Which may, or may not be a good thing.
Well we know this tech works because there are already ultrasonic cutters in medical and industrial equipment. So it’s more about whether they implemented it well, rather than some new fundamental discovery.
Feel free to correct me if I’m off base, but it doesn’t seem like the robot is actually slicing. Looks more like it’s just mashing the blade into the tomato. In this case I can see how the vibration can make up for the lack of slicing action. Ie sliding the blade across the tomato.
My question is: would there still be an improvement if they used a slicing action?
A slight tangent but I find sharpness tests often don’t represent the experience at the macro level, but it’s easily benchmarked and quantified.
As an example are tons of people pushing Feather or Astra or similar ultra sharp shaving razors. I bought a ton of sample packs the ones I liked the most were Kai, which are considered relatively dull, but have properties which make the overall experience better (I recall reading they’re thicker and vibrate less during cutting).
To me that makes this knife cutting benchmark more attractive than sharpness or retention, but I still have questions about technique used in the benchmarks, and how that affects knife performance (e.g. I would never try to cut bread by just pressing down as this move does).
Jacques Pépin suggested at [0] "basically you need three knives":
- a chopping knive, 9-12" depending on one's hand
- a utility knife for slicing, about 6"
- a paring knife, a cheaper ordinary one is fine
Of those, other than the chopping/chef's knife, I imagine that one could generally slice cheese with the utility knife (depending on the cheese, of course).
A Santoku or other knife with scalloped sides do well. There are also in fact, cheese knifes, for cutting and serving that are popular for self service cheese boards. Wire is also popular for cutting large block cheeses.
Ironically, the cheeses I would cut with a chef's knife are exactly the ones that aren't going to stick to the knife. The ones that get messy are just as easy to cut with a butter knife.
(Amusingly, butter is one of the demos in this video.)
My question for this product is entirely different: It's well-known that ultrasonic sound can still damage your hearing despite being inaudible or nearly so. Does this?
The problems were even bigger than that - they tested factory sharpness and factory geometry that often are shit. And not thinning and sharpening them properly. Let alone that the steel on the factory edge has high chance to fatigued/softer than the rest.
I personally watched Scott spend years working on the project and obsessively iterating on the steel, the vibration pattern, the circuitry, the handle, and the form factor. Scott is a hacker, one of us for sure. I mean, the guy built a custom robot just to measure cutting efficiency...
The knife is amazing and exactly as shown in the video. Rand Fishkin has a nice short on LinkedIn trying out the knife too. I think he shows one his (sharp) kitchen knives slicing through a lemon, then the Ultrasonic. It's astounding.
Disclaimer: I am a (tiny) angel investor in Seattle Ultrasonics.
Does that video show him doing actual prep? I 100% believe he made a knife that can make a paper-thin slice of a lemon. But that's not what a chef's knife is for. As someone who thinks the world would be a better place if this product worked and was successful: for god's sake record someone processing an onion. That's what matters.
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...
So, I just watched this, and he's not processing a shallot, he's just slowly talking thin slices off it. Also: even when my MAC is rolled over and needs a hone, it still does a lime just as well.
I'm not saying this knife doesn't work just that I'm noticing that none of the videos show it working.
Seriously, it is only a little bit of an exaggeration to say that the entire job of a chef's knife is to quickly process an onion. What's especially weird is that even an inert knife with its factory edge will show well in an onion dice video!
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..
Even the best tend to struggle with consistency and can only go so thin due to all the friction. An ultrasonic mandoline that can overcome all that would probably fly off the shelves and better match the original industrial intent.
On one hand I would buy that instantly. On the other hand, it’s already missing small pieces thanks to my current mandolin. Not sure I want to make my scariest utensil scarier.
I think if this can keep a knife effectively sharper than the equivalent nice steel with less maintenance, then it’s going to find a market.
I’m a nerd, but Ive found that once I’ve mastered a hobby I eventually gravitate towards convenience, optimizing my time over absolute performance. I’ve built five PCs in my life, and now I only own a macbook. I spent loads of time optimizing my hifi setup, and now most of my apartment is sonos. And I have probably 1k worth of nice japanese knives + whetstones, that I would happily replace with a single knife that needs little to no upkeep.
I am like you, but my concern with this knife is lifespan. My Japanese knives will last a lifetime. This knife has no warranty that I could find, but how long do we expect it to live? If it’s 10 years or so, I could be happy with it.
This 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.
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 edge with a softer back is necessary for a strong knife that will cut well. This is a function of heat treatment. A knife that is tempered the same the whole blade is fine for smaller knives but it’s possible to break the tips or edges off larger knives. From there metallurgy affects the edge retention and how easy it is to sharpen. Plain 440C will make a fine enough knife if heat treated properly but can also make blades that can’t be made particularly sharp and can’t easily be sharpened. These knives will be very stainless so this is why poor quality and good quality knives will be made in 440C. The next tier of knives beyond singular steel forging will be a very hard edge steel wrapped around a softer core steel. The sky is the limit from there in terms of metallurgy. The highest end knives will use powdered steel where precisely composed steel bars are made using uniform grains of steel and other attractive metals and doping materials as part of the forging process.
Once it gets home a good edge has to be maintained.
People do all sorts of things to dull perfectly good cutlery (I cringe when I see people use glass or marble serving/cheese boards as a cutting board). A off hand toss of a knife into a sink can roll the edge.
The worst offense is when I see someone at a farmers market with the grinding wheel “sharpening” a knife by crudely removing the hardened steel edge of a knife. Good luck cutting much with the softer core steel or softer tempered back steel.
While having an Evangelion style ultrasonic knife is cool, it’s certainly not necessary and I expect it can be ruined in many of the same ways a $400 traditional knife can be.
At home I have Henkels for the holidays and some forged food service knife’s for general use. When visitors throw the food service knives into the sink I just take out the sharpening stones and don’t cry all that much.
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?
Knives are already high tech and the GP’s point that you don’t need an ultrasonic knife is valid even if “QVC product” is inaccurate. They’re not just hunks of steel. Sharp knives can be dulled by abuse which something that vibrates will be vulnerable to as well.
This is akin to the already established very expensive powdered steel knives. Do you need this to have a sharp knife? Nope. Is anyone wrong for wanting it? No.
This product isn't about not having to sharpen your knife.
It's about a knife that is ~equivalently sharp to begin with, but slices with less force and less sticking, and can therefore slice things more exactly/easily than otherwise.
Of course you don't need it, but it's fundamentally different from existing knives, which you seem to not be acknowledging. When you say this is akin to "powdered steel knives", no it isn't. Powdered steel is about hardness. Nothing to do with ease of slicing or lack of sticking.
So you're talking about things that have nothing to do with this particular technology.
I’m not taking a negative view on this knife or technology. I believe you’re misunderstanding the intention of my color commentary? “Do not need” is not equivalent to “this is terrible.”
Powdered metallurgy, to parry your point, is not about hardness but about having the most precise composition of a metal. I.e you can have better wearing 440C, better machinable 440C, etc. most of this was intended for manufacturing high end industrial equipment. For kitchen knives it’s unnecessary even if it’s cool. It’s incrementally better but like this product it’s not necessary.
Similarly this isn’t “new technology” aside from the packaging of industrial technology into a chefs knife. You can get X-Acto knife sized versions of this already. Ceramic blades came from industrial alumina production. Cool, not necessary, but nothing wrong if it’s your jam.
The classic “QVC knife” is the Ginsu knife which has a lot of the same claims/qualities from a far. It’s an implementation of pattern welded steel and when you use a microscope you’ll see its thousands of serrated edges. Their ad shows the user cutting a can and then thinly slicing a tomato. Works fine until the edge gets rolled and since it’s cheaply processed steel (lacking the points of good construction I mentioned above), that’s usually what happens. I’d expect the company this whole discussion is about doing a lot better here since they’re not trying to sell a three knife set for $29.95 with free shipping.
My point about things being easily damaged with mishandling is that most people simply don’t handle knives well enough to see a benefit from high end knives, not that they aren’t nice/better/valid/different/etc. All of that can be true and the knife no longer cut because the edge is damaged. A Ferrari is a technologically complex car but not a very good car if the tires are all flat. If this thing doesn’t have an edge it isn’t going to cut well.
This is a point they make on their own site:
> Is the knife dishwasher safe?
> Updated 13 days ago
>
> No, but neither is any sharp knife. Dishwasher detergents contain micro-abrasives that dull and chip away at knife edges. If you enjoy using sharp knives, never put them in the dishwasher!
This is actually a more strict take than I have on edge retention, but I wouldn’t complain if my cutlery were treated this way.
Like I said a few posts up, I have knives that cost several hundred dollars. I keep the cheap ones out so I don’t cry when they get lobbed into a sink with the dirty dishes. When sharp they all cut very well. The expensive ones are better at edge retention and can be made a little sharper. After a friend helps clean or cuts some cheese on the cheese board the knife that was used is dull and not a great tool, be it the $30 food service knife or the $400 Henkels knife. You just can’t cheat physics.
This is a semantic argument. This product smacks of being a garbage kitchen gadget. Whether or not it's a QVC product, it certainly looks like cheap white-label alibaba junk. Just look at that handle. Did they just slap a knifeblade into an electric nosehair trimmer?
I'd try one out of professional/academic curiosity (I'm a chef), but am highly skeptical of this product. It looks like absolute trash.
All the people saying this knife does anything remarkable clearly have no experience in maintaining a decent knife blade. 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).
Having said all that, you won't find an accurate takedown of a product that isn't on the market yet. Still, I can't help but wonder if the person behind this had dedicated that effort towards helping mitigate the water crisis, deforestation, or any number of other inarguably nobler pursuits.
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 cut through bread easily without a serrated edge? What I’m seeing in the video is a lot more versatile. But I can see needing a smaller utility knife still.
I worked in some of the best kitchens on the planet and for every hipster with a blue paper #2 carbon steel hand made japanese chefs knife there was an old gray beard with a row of old busted victorinoxes hanging on the wall. Both of these cooks would filet a halibut beautifully.
> 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.
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.
It depends on the bread. Many breads are basically impossible to cut properly with a straight edge knife. They end up disfigured worse than what you’re describing with serrated knives.
Have you seen this knife do any of these things in action? Will it continue to do so? Nobody has, or will, until this gadget hits the market.
I remain skeptical in spite of your weird defensive reaction. I'm speaking about how a product appears to me as a professional. Not attcking you personally (unless it's your product... then I think you should do something good for society with your time)
The blade must be sharpen regardless, the apex won't stay sharp on its right own. The vibration does help but it doesn't do any actual cutting if you dull the blade.
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.
Its my understanding of knife sharpening that carbon steel is easier to sharpen then stainless and that softer steels are more difficult then high hrc steel due to burr removal.
i've had both, and the reality is that they're both just steel -- a good grind will make any shit steel knife cut like a 700 dollar Japanese blade for a few days.
(and yes the Japanese steel dulls too. No cheating physics.)
I use a knock-off of the edgepro I got for $30 online, with a nice set of compatible whetstones that click into the assembly that were $20 online. I did what everyone else does and hotglued some magnets underneath the piece you hold the knife on.
I tried a compatible strop that clicks in but it's not worth it imo; just use a normal strop.
just want to point out that maintaining a knife is a whole hobby that requires a time investment of learning the skill and storage of additional tools and materials. i'm surprised at all the apparent knife enthusiast posts trashing this device. I take my victorinox (which is absolutely nothing special and surprises me that it costs $60+ dollars) to the farmers market for sharpening but sharpness isn't even the problem. Potatoes in particular stick to the blade like a strong magnet and it takes me 5x longer to prep. I enjoy cooking but not chopping endless veggies and i'm hoping this thing can carry some of that weight without looking like i'm using an oversized electric toothbrush.
> just want to point out that maintaining a knife is a whole hobby that requires a time investment of learning the skill and storage of additional tools and material.
You're right that's a hobby. But the hobby's definition of "proper maintenance" and what it "requires" is basically just people nerding out about things that don't matter the slightest in the real world.
To maintain a kitchen knife so that it cuts a tomato without squishing it, you don't need a book on knife science. Further, that nerdery is probably actively harmful, because instead of simple solutions, people are told they need an inspection microscope and a variety of jigs and other implements. So they buy an objectively bad electric sharpener and move on.
> just want to point out that maintaining a knife is a whole hobby that requires a time investment of learning the skill and storage of additional tools and materials.
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.
Yes as I mentioned I use often-recommended knives (victorinox, shun) and have them occasionally sharpened professionally and at least in my case the ultrasonic knife appears to solve some very real problems that knife maintenance cannot.
it takes no skill to make a blunt knife sharper. To make a sharp knife sharper, sure, but in a good vast majority of home knife situations, just doing anything with any flat sharpening surface is an improvement.
I can attest to this as I have improved knifes day one of trying despite my lack of any sort of skill
Sharpening a knife to r/sharpening standards is hard. But just honing frequently and occasionally using a cheap sharpener will get you further than 95% of home chefs.
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.
I used to sharpen my straight-knife planer blades, planing irons, chisels, and knives with whetstones / water stones. It was too big of a pain in the ass over time, so I switched to diamond stones.
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.
Whetstones were hard 20 years ago. Right now there is abundance of quality info and products. The community actually figured out idiotproof and effective ways to deburr, to strop, resin bound diamond stones are affordable (or even cheap if you just buy the abrasive from China and go the diy route).
In my case I just wait for the sharpening knife guy who pass once a week in my neighborhood. It is quite easy as I am working from home and he plays those distinctive panpipes notes.
When it does come time to sharpen, I constantly see places offering knife sharpening services, and they’re usually cheap enough. Or you could get a gizmo that does a mediocre job (and shaves away far too much material) if you just want to get it done. Or you could learn to do it yourself which isn’t that hard or time-consuming but is somewhat of a labor of love.
umm, you raise a valid concern, afaict, however, e-waste is kind of a taboo word around here, or? Or maybe just another part of the 'inevitable' belief system.
Like, how about that _planned obsolescence_ of a vast majority of consumer electronics hardware?
(If that ain't the case, would be happen to learn otherwise from someone with better knowledge.)
I guess with knives the thing is it’s very easy and cheap to get a version that works well lasts pretty much forever. Makes the other options look worse in comparison.
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.
> using a $10 knife that is only reasonably well sharpened is probably 90% as good
I think the value proposition is in the idea that you don't have to sharpen this knife as often as with a normal knife, and that the performance is consistent.
The non stickiness is also a huge value proposition, because that is an annoying and time consuming aspect of any cutting.
I think it's because it seems like a Juicero to anyone who uses knives to make dinner regularly. We're fascinated by tech, and sure, I'd try this, but I bet anyone who has prepped with a knife for hours per week is probably pretty skeptical on the practicality here.
A sharpened piece of metal has been reliable for thousands of years and will continue to remain so. For new tech, I am also a fan of the ceramic knives out there for vegetables, as they hold a razors edge much longer than metal (albeit are far more brittle - I use them for veggies only, no meat).
One can buy a decent steel chef's knife, a ceramic one, lose them both, buy them again, buy a sharpening stone and a strop for the price of one of these. On one hand, the sci-fi emergence of the vibroblade or something in the kitchen would be cool. On the other, it could be a $500 vibrating slapchop[1].
> It's expensive (but not really, only compared to knives - a $500 GPU isn't expensive).
No, it's really expensive. $400 is nearly a week's pay for an hourly worker in much of the US. For many on this site it might be less than a day's labor but that's not the general case.
The lack of trust is probably because knives seem to be a favorite product of shysters. Selling expensive knives that promise the moon and wow the audience with cool knife tricks just reeks of fast talking late-night infomercial salesman trying to get over on grandma. The tech looks cool, but the presentation is off-putting.
"Sure, people claim the kitchen knife has been a solved problem
for hundreds of years, but what if there was a kitchen knife that had a battery inside and cost $500?"
And if this version of the knife doesn't connect to the cloud, the next one will.
Everything has pros and cons. You haven't said a single pro. You haven't added any real cons to what I said, and made up hypothetical ones.
It's a sales pitch so you're saying why you wouldn't buy it. I'm not ordering one either, 500 is a bit steep for me. If he just showed off the technology, I suspect people here would be more enthusiastic about it, even if you wouldn't bother to buy it yourself.
I'm not saying you're wrong (at the price point), but that the framing of whether we're going to buy it is a result of the marketing.
> if this version of the knife doesn't connect to the cloud, the next one will.
That's just ugly cynicism. And I'm willing to bet a good amount of money the "next one" from this company won't. But it doesn't matter because this one doesn't and we're talking about this one, not some hypothetical that may never arrive.
If the rechargeable vibrator-knife becomes a fixture of kitchens around the world, it will prove the accusation of 'cynicism'. Until then, whether it's cynicism or sobriety is a matter of opinion.
We are usually skeptical. And I don't know why a weird ad for a smart-knife has gotten to the top-page of HN.
We don't like "buzz" and "hype"... if it's truly a great technology we can buy one a year from now. Not trusting a commercial to be honest isn't undue skepticism.
Maybe I'm just a sci-fi nerd who loves innovation, but this is so cool!
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?
I thought I recognised the name - Bourbon Moth is the guy who faked a video of oily rags self-igniting to make a video to advertise fireproof bins for woodworking.
Never heard of either of these Youtubers but I've seen tons of cans of stains and such with warnings about potential self-ignition if left on rags in the wrong conditions...
Writer Jack London's mansion,The Wolf House, that he was building up in Sonoma county was destroyed by a fire that investigators later attributed to the spontaneous combustion of oil-soaked rags in the dining room...
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.
Interesting question, short answer - almost certainly not any more or less than you are already, and to the degree it does, it almost certainly is making things better and not worse.
First - ~all food illness causing bacteria is denser than air. about 1000x denser. On its own, it won't float.
Second - almost all cutting motions are still going to throw it around. So you are already doing this when you cut or chop food. You are slicing cell walls, etc, releasing pathogens that exist inside. But it doesn't like aerosolize in the sense of floating around, because it's denser than air[1]. How far it goes depends on the cutting motion, etc.
Third - does ultrasonic make it better or worse - well, again, it doesn't overall float, so it's really a question of does it do anything to make go farther/less far, and does it do anything to destroy or the opposite?
44khz (used here) is a common ultrasonic frequency in cleaning[2] and leak detection.
In fact, it's also used to remove bacterial cells from surfaces at higher intensities (and detect them at lower intensities).
It's actually one of the major ways non-heat pasteurization is done.
While it's not 100% at removing individual bacterial cells, even at super high intensity, ultrasonic frequencies are both detrimental to cell growth, and as used here, will cause lots and lots of bacterial death because of everything from cavitation to pressure changes to instantaneous heat to you name it.
Does it fling pathogens any further? Maybe? I'm sure there are some situations in which it will. But they don't seem normal. Like if you are just slicing raw meat or chicken, it's hard to see how it could do that.
Overall, it probably helps more than it hurts. As far as i can tell, it's not even a close question.
[1] It is possible to get the bacteria to float in air anyway due to brownian motion and other mechanisms, but it still seems overblown - the percent of food borne illness caused by inhaling bacteria vs eating underprepared food it is so small they don't even bother to track it. This knife is not going to change that.
[2] If you google it, you will also discover it's emitted by fearful rats. I don't know if the knife also scares rats away.
A good quality well sharpened knife already works incredibly well, doesn't cost $500, doesn't need to be recharged, and isn't going to be e-waste in 5 years (when the battery fails).
It's a cool idea, and I hope it is commercially successful, but not for me.
This thing is $399, which is on the expensive side of prestige chef knives, but by no means the extravagant side of it. People who buy knives that cost more than $150 generally buy lots of knives, and this is priced for that market.
But it's not priced for the market of people who buy lots of knives. Because those who buy lots of knives aren't going to be interested in some mediocre knife with a vibration motor attached to it.
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.
Yeah I mean, the product is either going to work or it isn't going to work. But the only people who are going to be early adopters for this are knife nerds. Obviously, you'll get a knife that r/chefknives admires for cheaper than that!
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.
It’s $499 with the wireless charger. I see that the charger isn’t required. You can take the battery out of the knife and charge it by USB. I would correct my comment, but it is no longer possible for me to edit it.
It's a proprietary form factor, so you're gambling on replacements being available down the line. I don't think it'll be easy to rebuild the battery pack without compromising the casing.
Given the battery specs and the form factor of the products, they could have used a 14500 cell that retails for $5. That's not as much recurring revenue as charging $80 for something proprietary though.
The dead battery is still e-waste and recycling isn't a magically neutral activity that brings back one new product out of an old one with no loss or energy spent.
I was just curious about two things - seems there might be some knife aficionados or experts here!
1. Sharpening - As a home cook, who doesn't know a lot about knives/sharpening - how hard would this be to maintain? Would it be plausible to get some basic home sharpening gear, and maintain this myself? Or should I take it to a professional knife sharpener - and if so, how do I even know if they're a good one, and won't damage the blade, or perhaps are good, but somehow get the blade out of "tune" etc?
2. Safety wise - is there anything at all to be concerned about with ultrasonic 40Khz blades? Should I be wearing any hearing protection when using this? (Context - I have hearing loss in both ears, and wear hearing aids - keen to preserve my remaining hearing, and am understandably cautious about this kind of thing for my family and me).
the next version will come with plasma micro jets ejection from the cutting edge - convenient for civilian use. I'm also wandering about an array of shaped micro-charges on the edge - should be able to cut through several millimeters of steel in one move, etc. so a soldier can cut though an opponent's ballistic vest or a into an lightly armored IFV.
You can have it sharp with shaped charges array sitting a bit deeper and sideways, and new edge breaking out as side effect of shaped charges exploding, rinse and repeat, about 5 times for a regularly sized sword.
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)
I actually thought that was a neat touch, since that's one of my most frequent interactions with an online video. But it needs to be overridden when the pointer is over the other controls. I couldn't scrub through the video on desktop without repeatedly muting/unmuting.
While I think this is neat, I doubt the added complexity of the device, extra space required for storage of charger and the chore of charging it are worth the benefit of a slightly better, easier slice. Might be nice for people with certain disabilities though.
How much do you actually cook though? As a former professional chef I still do a lot of cooking and I’d love one of these and any storage trade off looks absolutely worth while.
Yeah, have to say the video is pretty good. I came in expecting the typical shopping channel pitch, but it did a very good job explaining the things the knife can and can't do. It really helps that it's presented by the inventor himself.
I think it’s really cool, but not sure about the button design (seams to trap germs) and placement (index finger is not where I naturally exert pressure when cutting with a kitchen knife).
Also would be nice if it can be fitted to existing blades as handle retrofit, but I understand that might not be possible to properly tune the vibrations.
For $500+ you can get a really, REALLY nice Damascus steel chef's knife with a beautiful patina and wood handle. Yes: it requires a bit more maintainable but nice things often require some work. When it's properly honed & sharpened, it'll cut just as well as this.
So you're basically saying that you can spend as much money to get a knife that will cut as well but requires regular work put into it, whereas this doesn't? I think that's the whole pitch here...
I work with some bigger ultrasonic cutters/welders and the thing I didn't see in the video was the horrible noise they make. He says the knife makes no noise but they also don't have the noise on for the shots of the bigger ones so I'm suspicious.
I watched the video and this seems pretty neat. Don't want to knock it or be negative. He's definitely right that most people's knives are dull – when I use knives in other people's homes I often just want to cry at how dull they are (also: pans – how the hell do so many people have dented damaged pans?) But you really don't need to splurge out €329 to have reasonably sharp knives.
All you need is a sharpening steel and use it once or twice after every usage. Even a cheap knife will last for years while remaining reasonable sharp. Mine was €6 or thereabouts at Tesco two years ago and is more than sharp enough.
Of course more expensive knifes (ultrasonic or not) are better and can hold an edge longer. You can spend more time, effort, and money on making them sharper than just a quick use of a cheap sharpening steel. If you want to spend the extra money: go for it! But for a normal home cook: you can go a long way with consistent use of a €10 sharpening steel.
Ultrasonic 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 constant motion heats up the blade, to the point of melting thermoplastics or causing the edge to lose temper if you're pushing a bit too hard, cutting the wrong material, etc.
It's your money, but I suspect this knife is more of a hassle, and requires more care, than a regular kitchen knife. And let's face it, the coolness factor aside, how often do you struggle to cut chicken, tomatoes, or bread? If you do, it's probably because your knife is dull, and this knife will get dull too.
I'm an amateur cook, my immediate question was how much the vibration and heating will affect vegetable and meat oxidation and cell damage on the cut surface.
Could this improve the texture and flavor of certain foods? Like make garlic taste even more garlicky? Or could it cause an apple slice to brown faster? Can it be used to slice cooked fish as if it were sashimi? Etc.
If a site like SeriousEats does a product review I hope they focus on qualitative taste, and possibilities for enhancing cooking techniques, not merely saving time/effort to do something.
all the comparisons in the vid show knives being pushed through the food. that's not a good way to use a knife.
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.
It depends completely on the knife. A nakiri or a bunka wants you to push cut, for instance.
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.
That’s not necessary with an ultrasonic knife and would generally be a waste of time. The vibrations take the place of needing to slice, rather than chop. This knife is not meant to be used like a normal chef’s knife.
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.
If it helps, the inventor worked at other kitchen product companies like Sansaire (founder) and Anova. And at other places in the cooking world. So they’re not entirely unknown either.
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...
Probably not great, otherwise they would have shown it, but being able to cut frozen food properly would be a game changer. The only things I found working are saws, and they are messy.
I've invested close to a thousand dollars in sharpening tools over the years. I keep my knives super sharp as a hobby more than anything. I'd still love to have one of these in the drawer for certain tasks. It's ugly and clunky but I'd probably still use it on a semi-regular basis for warm breads, cheeses, etc. I bet the action would help with sharpening as well.
I do wonder if a tuning fork or 'mass on a stick' hidden in the tang could provide enough vibration to help with the sticking. You'd probably have to smack it with every cut but it's so rarely a problem that would be fine.
Oh wow - would love to know what you got for sharpening, or what you'd suggest for the home cook?
When you say ugly/clunky - I'm guessing you mean it's a bit heavier, or the weight will be off compared to a good high-end chef's knife? (I don't have anything like that, haha).
I did note on their FAQ they say to never activate the blade whilst sharpening:
> Do not activate the ultrasonics during sharpening - this can damage both the blade and your sharpening stones, as the ultrasonic movement is too aggressive and not evenly distributed across the entire cutting edge. Also, reshaping the blade to a different belly curvature or tip shape can cause it to fall out of tune, so avoid removing more material than you would during normal sharpening.
The concept of the knife is interesting. I could see myself buying one if I had that much money lying around.
Maybe if the home chef who needs a leg up sees this it would prevent them from spending that much or more on more expensive knives and maintenance products. For those of us who know our way around the kitchen I’m not sure how much benefit I would get out of it.
Also did anyone think some of the cutting segments, particularly the radish, seemed sped up? The movement of the blade and hand looked a bit unnatural.
If you're an amateur and really want to spend this much money, get a good enough knife (e.g. the classic victorinox) and a chef's choice electric sharpener, and you won't have any more issues.
I've read multiple reviews saying the chefs choice sharpeners are basically useless. Having owned 2 of them I can confirm they seem to do almost nothing after the first few times using them.
A few YT knife channels have done deep dives showing why they stop working soon after purchase, the details escape me but I have to agree with the end result....
I 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:
This product is a huge gimmick. Buy a $20 double sided sharpening stone on amazon and you can keep even the cheapest stainless steel knives sharp and chef ready for years. Just basic knife sharpening skills are needed which you can pick up in 10 minutes on YouTube.
Theres a whole class of people who will pay more to not have to maintain things themselves. I bought an EV because they require little maintenance and I also hate filling up.
I have decent knives but have probably never sharpened them properly. If there are more reviews, I'd pick this up.
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 interest in how the ultrasonic tech fares.
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?
A different but far better piece of cutting edge technology is a modern, diamond-encrusted nickel/chrome-plated steel plate.
These things are now so sharp they can bring an edge profile back to a knife in five strokes without even needing lubrication (which is nice as water is a PITA when it causes corrosion between the steel bed and the plating.)
Every knife in your kitchen can be razor sharp in seconds and kept razor sharp whenever you need them to be. IMHO, far more useful than a single digi-vibro-knife.
Example product: Trend 300/1000 diamond sharpening kit.
Agreed. Even a knife with heavy usage only needs a few swipes to realign the edge. Warning though, sharpening things can be addicting. I have a massive straight razor and finishing stone collection. It's a wonderful hobby, but dipping into natural stones gets very expensive
The bit that looks actually interesting to me is buried in the middle of the video - while the ultrasonic switch is on, food visibly falls off the knife instead of sticking to the sides.
As 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.
I would get this for the same reason I'm planning to replace my couch with an optimal-for-moving-through-a-turn couch as soon as I find a carpenter willing to make it. The middle part will be evened-out by a separate, round cushion.
I think a lot of the commentary here is missing the main point — while you may not (I mean, certainly do not) need an ultrasonic chef's knife, it's a cool origin story, and the guy has the receipts! Years of iterations of circuit board design, blade shapes, and the robotic cut-test arm... I personally would enjoy using this in my kitchen just for the hacker vibes.
Although not a pro, or even a good cook, I do like quality knives — but, like most people who develop a casual nice-knife affinity, I then bought a few quality knives, a couple of junk knives to try restoring with a whetstone, a hand-made Japanese knife with my name on it, and... then I had enough kitchen knives to last the rest of my life, and there was no reason to buy any more.
This is the first one I have considered in years. Not because I need it, or because it's necessarily better at cutting must things than the workhorse Sekimagoroku nakiri I use[1] but because it's fucking neat and radiates nerdium waves.
This knife should be celebrated for what it is: basically an epic nerd project. That can also cut at least a few kinds of fruit more easily (or at least more enjoyably).
[1]: KAI model AE5206 (which seems very much like a Shun knife, made by the same company, but cost me only $53)
If you have a sharp knife and a wet cloth under your cutting board chopping is a joy, otherwise it's a dangerous, tedious, and exhausting task that turns so many people away from cooking entirely
The wet cloth between the counter and the cutting block keeps the cutting block from sliding / moving on you when force is applied, which is more comfortable and safer.
I cook every day, and I’m also a mechanical engineer, I’ve never understood where the sideways force comes from. I’ve also never had a board slide away from me. Tbh I thought this came from chefs chopping on stainless steel worktop. I’d like to understand.
When you chop, you're applying force almost entirely vertically. When you slice, you're applying at least some force horizontally. That horizontal force can be transmitted through the knife to the food to the cutting board, causing the board to slide. It's especially noticeable when you're slicing food that is high, like a loaf of bread, and the cutting board is on a slick stone countertop.
So the issue with that tomato cutting test was that it was terrible form.
You obviously don't apply flat pressure on a tomato until it breaks, you slice it by sliding the blade forward as you push down. It's unclear to me that this blade offers any improvement over proper technique, and feels disingenuous to even offer that comparison.
He specifically says it's not a lightsaber, and when he's cutting the tomato you can see he does have to apply force for it to go through. He compares it to an ebike, where it makes cutting easier but it's not magic.
If you’re used to sharp knives then it’s probably safer than applying more pressure which could yield in surprising ways. Getting used to it is the dangerous part, especially if not forewarned or the user doesn’t heed the warning.
Lightsaber would be different because doesn’t have a blade to guide.
Not really. The dangerous aspect of a knife is when it moves unexpectedly. The sharper it is, the harder it is to create a scenario where it jumps on something particularly dense, like when a saw hits a knot in a tree.
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.
You say this from any special
knowledge or is it just your opinion from the video? Looks to me like it will go through your flesh and bone like they're not there, in a way even a razor sharp knife won't.
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.
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.
I'm still in the camp that air fryers are stupid. A convection oven does literally the same thing.
Also, portable air fryers make such small servings that they're useless for people with families. What the hell I going to do with three chicken wings?
I find it funny most of these comments are about how unnecessary this thing is.
To me it has immediate appeal to make cutting easier. It's also really not that expensive. I suppose this is the same site that is crazy about AI and thought Dropbox would flop. This thing has more utility than AI to me. I suppose being a software person can warp your perception of the real world.
What does this device accomplish in the kitchen, besides being able to make fine slices of vegetables more easily? Electric carver knives beat it for slicing meat.
And then for most any other situation of knife usage it isn't necessary at all, as knives are mostly used for chopping. The one (1) thing I can see this being useful for is a shrunken down version for paring, but whether or not that is mechanically feasible, I don't know. The curve and the handle are more important than this vibro-verbing.
Nice dialogue, btw. "Help chefs feel great about themselves in the kitchen", "access to sous vide". <Kitchen Woke> ?
In particular, you don't need expensive stones, guides or lapping systems to do it. An aliexpress-grade 3000/8000 waterstone, a flattening stone and a strop will get most knives shaving the hairs off your arm for under £20 all-in.
The odds I will ever learn to use a waterstone or strop are nil. A Chef’s Choice manual sharpener is really easy and makes my knives plenty sharp enough to cut tomatoes.
Yeah they work fine too. The point is not that you need stones to sharpen knives at all, but you don't need insanely expensive glass or diamond stones like the YouTubers tend to tell you to get to shaving-sharp if you want to.
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!).
I'd very strongly recommend vs the waterstone. Use a ceramic or diamond one. The strop is not required but it's nice.
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.
I use the 300 only if the knives are too dull or I want to change the apex to 20 degrees. Honing them back is just the 1200 and a strop. Like mentioned I can shave with that. 3000 is overkill imo, unless you are looking for the mirror finish.
Never heard it would be too fine for some steel. 300 is for creating a new edge or fixing chips or otherwise broken edge, 1000 and 3000-4000 is enough for maintaining a chefs knife. And if you can't get a knife sharp on 1000 you need to fix your technique.
I agree. My experience: I bought some basic sharpening stones and watched some youtube and have had pretty good results with my basic japenese chef knives (~$100-150) that I've had for 15 years. It's 5 minutes of work every month or two for me. This product doesn't make sense to me for the price point. The aesthetics look really poor.
Maybe it’s dumb. But the video seems convincing. Ultrasonic knives are also used in some industrial and medical settings. So the concept does work. And the inventor of this one worked at Sansaire, Anova, and other kitchen hardware places. So they have a lot of credibility producing real products.
Hehe, yeah I was wondering if something like SawStop could work. It would just need to switch off the ultrasonic, not spectacularly destroy the blade. However, I then remembered the frankfurter demo for SawStop and realised there are extra challenges for something that is actually intended for cutting meat.
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.
Most importantly, buying useful things, that will likely be used for a long time and contain about as much e-waste as a single-use vape.
I don't use knives in my kitchen. My romantic partner does. Yesterday I decided to cut some tomatoes only to find out that all knives are dull.
She never said anything, I didn't know it. Why?
Because she is just "used" to it and to her these knives were just fine. So she never thought about sharpening knives in the first place.
I will take those knives to a pro and he will sharpen them for me, as in a rental I stay in, I don't have the tools to do that and as I said in another comment - I don't have a pain free process to do that as I don't do it often.
You don't really need "tools" to sharpen knives. You just need a harder surface and some experience. It's one of those things that once you learn you can accomplish with a variety of "tools" because you're just trying to achieve an end goal. There's zero reason you can't sharpen a knife in a rental, lol. You don't need a belt grinder or anything.
People get way too caught up in buying into systems and being told how to do things because it alleviates some anxiety of trying something new. Sharpening knives hasn't really changed much in the last few centuries. Watch a few guides and learn to do it. There's no substitute for experience here. It's also a very transferable skill so it's one that used to be taught in schools but no longer is.
> There's no substitute for experience here. It's also a very transferable skill so it's one that used to be taught in schools but no longer is.
This 100% should be taught in school, it would have been one of the most useful things I could have learned.
when I was poor I used to make pricy shaving blades last for months longer than they should have by rubbing them on some old jeans. I don’t remember where I learned it but my roommates thought I was crazy til they tried it.
I'm surprised there isn't moralizing about the price point. I don't see why the US is so far behind in manufacturing efficiency. Everything seem to be 10-100x the cost of comparable Chinese goods, and US labor isn't paid anywhere close to 100x more.
Eh, it's pretty clear this price point isn't driven by manufacturing. It's driven by being a bespoke item with tons of R&D costs that need to be recouped.
If this turns into a significant market, I'm sure the cost will plummet.
Why would manufacturing cost come into play? Isn't it a given that a company will charge as much as they can get away with charging? Cost of labor and material I understood to only matter at the absolute bottom of a highly commoditized market e.g., bolts or capacitors or whatever. This is the only consumer ultrasonic knife (as far as I know) so they can charge whatever.
Is it that they cannot sell it for cheaper or that this price will maximize profits?
This episode of the Search Engine podcast goes into detail about that:
* https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-puzzle-of-the-all-...
Did you mean the Search Engine podcast..?
I did. Thanks for the correction.
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.
Since you seem knowledgeable about knives, Do you know any great knives makers? And are those custom steels or carbide blades worth it?
So far, I mostly sharpen my knives on the back of a plate. So definitely could be doing more :)
Most people can buy an opinel and be happy for decades. You don't need anything fancy for a general purpose knife. $50 max, and that's if you're feeling like getting something special.
Expensive steels are, by and large, incremental progress over cheaper knife steels, provided it got an appropriate heat treatment and has good edge geometry. In almost no applications will an end consumer notice the difference.
Knives get stupid beyond a certain price point.
I've been using the same thrift store knife I picked up 15 years ago. It gets sharpened maybe once a year, honed every so often. It was like $20 i think? Most chefs I know have a similar story with their knife/knives, something cheap that does the job.
Spending more on knives is just status symbol nonsense, which unfortunately has infected absolutely everything. It's like spending $300 on a spanner wrench. Who in the hell spends that much on a wrench? Why would you spend that much on a knife? lol. It's what you do with it that matters.
I admire you. You are a minority, you know that, right?
I don't have time in my schedule at the moment, which says "sharpen the knifes". So for me - it would be amazing if someone solved this problem in a radical way.
Sporadically I would sharpen the knives and since I don't have it in my "skills" section of the brain, I always have to "figure out" sharpening process.
In Japan I could just drop my knife in a nearby house's box with $6, they'd sharpen it and phone me to pick it up within a few hours. Cheap enough that I never bothered to do it myself.
> I always have to "figure out" sharpening process.
Get the Worksharp fixed angle sharpener for about $70 (about the price of 2 decent stones). If you're really interested, get the leather strop add on for about $10. Get on with sharpening your kitchen knives. Put it in your closet until next year.
Is it "great"? No. If you want to be a knife nerd, it's not for you.
If you have a couple of kitchen knives you need to sharpen once a year, it's absolutely fine. And you don't have to "get the feel" of sharpening again before you can get sharp kinves.
Even with the stones and equipment I have, it is way more mindless and a lot less messy to simply use a fixed-angle sharpener. Sure, you won't get "The Ultimate Hair Whittling Edge(tm)", but your knives will quite readily Julienne your vegetables.
Reiterating that any sharpener with the ability to set the angle is really all anyone needs if they don't want to invest in the time of learning how to sharpen.
I have the ruixin version and it works fine. I like that I can use the stones without the system.
Sure. Most fixed angle sharpeners work to some degree, I just recommended one that isn't sold by "Random Letter Chinese Shop" and that I have bought and know personally works.
In addition, for the moment, the stones used in the system I recommended are reliably decent and have been analyzed by a bunch of the YouTube knife nerds. The other fixed angle systems can be hit or miss with the stones.
If someone is sufficiently interested that they want to use the stones without the system, they've started down the path to being a knife nerd and have outgrown my recommendation.
> ...you are never going to make meaningful progress by telling consumers to feel bad for buying fun things.
I think it's a worthwhile message to tell folks that we, collectively, should be mindful about the resources we consume and the waste we produce. For such razor-thin (lol) gains in QoL, I think it's worth reminding people to consider whether it is worth the huge increase in waste. Knives are metal and wood/plastic... awfully efficient tools for the work they get done.
EDIT: And to balance the negativity, I _love_ the Seattle Ultrasonics logo.
You're not entirely wrong but the selective outrage (on e-waste) here is 100% off balance.
E-waste can be solved without reducing the number of items. Just requires basic investments in recycling.
This is also make takeaway. I have noticed this more and more on this site. Everything is criticized to an insane degree. If someone hasn't solved world hunger, while at the same time making money and curing their grandma of Alzheimer it will not be received well.
Oh good for them if they cure grandma of Alzheimer's. That's REALLY gonna help those of us whose grandmas are already dead.
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 is that Japanese knives (and my trusty MAC) fare really well on the BESS and CATRA scale, but relatively poorly on the "Food Cutting Rank", which is based on an ad-hoc seeming performance scale of how well their robot fared with a bunch of cutting tests that included stuff like bread and cheese (h/t again Slack friends) --- which nobody uses a chef's knife to cut.
That's a weird scale to plot chef's knives across --- unless the purpose of building that scale was to showcase an electronic knife that does well on tasks people don't normally use chef's knives for, but maybe not as well on chef knife daily driver tasks.
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 is that when Scott was cutting bread in the video he was cutting a croissant and no crumbs fell.
It will be interesting to see the knife in the hands of real chefs. Two things I'm curious about are whether the ergonomics of the button are good, and whether the ultrasonic action atomizes foods as they're being cut, changing the experience of cooking in some way.
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)
Hz vs kHz. Your parent's point is that the knife is vibrating far faster than even the fastest chefs would be slicing.
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.
The sixteenth notes in "Crazy Train"[1] are nominally 552 per minute, or 9.2 Hz. Moving a knife at 10 Hz is probably very difficult. I would expect 2-3 Hz is a normal pace for a skilled knife user and 4-5 Hz is showing off.
1: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tMDFv5m18Pw#t=0m32s
Cerebellar oscillation (in the inferior olive) gate motor control interrupt speed and are generally limited to ~10 Hz in humans.
That escalated quickly. Thank you!
Damn, I was set to completely dismiss this as entirely useless overcomplication but making stuff not stick to the knife would be nice.
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 expensive knives for a relatively rare edge case but it’s a neat innovation that might catch on elsewhere, or maybe they’ll make premium lines.
Maybe instead of building it into the knife, it needs to be something you could attach to any knife
Interesting idea, but I would say that it is orders of magnitude harder compared to having an integrated system. Vibration in such a compact space with a very sharp blade... I want this system be stable around me.
I would say, if this idea becomes popular, knife producers can create their own versions in the new models, or retrofit old knives at the shop.
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.
Cucumbers: put your cutting board in a sheet pan. Now they roll away but stop at the rim.
Also works for helping with fluid containment.
I had a similar problem with spring onions. So I give them a lengthways slice first. The half moons don't roll.
> The worst are cucumbers, they stick to the blade
Is this issue possibly that amateur knives are too "polished"?
This doesn't seem to be a "professional chef" problem yet seems to be a significant "amateur chef" problem.
Is this simply the case that a knife with professional use takes enough dings and scratches that foods won't vacuum seal to the face of the knife?
I mean, for both potatoes and cucumbers, I just use a v-slicer. $40.
The other weird thing about this is that neither a potato nor a cucumber demands an ultra-sharp knife.
if you have a nice knife and cut by dragging the knife towards you with tip in contact with the board instead of cutting directly down, food will not stick
The video comparison of this knife cutting through potato compared to a regular one is very enticing. My own experience is that there is more sticking even on my knives that have those scooped out edges that are supposed to prevent sticking.
Yeah, those do reduce sticking, but they certainly don’t prevent it entirely.
I'm not saying it can't work, just that they didn't show it, and after the required thin-tomato-slice that's the thing I'd most want to see the knife doing.
For reference it would be also nice to see your (and your Slack friends) knife handling skills.
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 Jacques Pepin onion dice. You know, an onion dice.
(The "Slack friend" thing was just that I felt bad about sharing a link I'd gotten just a few minutes while pretending as if I'd known about it myself. I have no idea their level of expertise! Probably better than mine though.)
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 technique/handling and the sharpening than the actual knife material or technology. But the average person does not care about those things, so this knife could at least in principle be something useful for them. Not for someone who is willing to invest some time in the aforementioned things though, like you (and me too, for that matter).
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.
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 :)
He acknowledges you can do that with a well-sharpened knife. Of course you can do it with a well-sharpened knife. It's exactly the demo every single sharp knife does! His claim is that the ultrasonic knife will always do that cut, whether or not you assiduously keep it sharp, which is what I have to do with my MAC and Yuki to make it cut tomatoes like that.
But most chef-knife cutting isn't thin tomato slices, and you can always do that cut with a good thin serrated bread knife, too. I want to see it dice an onion. Seems like a small ask.
Yep, I have a Shun with micro serrations ([0]) that will slice a tomato so finely you basically feel no resistance.
The only downside is that you can’t really hone or sharpen it yourself so you have to baby it. I’ve had mine about 15 years and have sent it in one time for their free sharpening at about the 11 year mark. At least Shun blades hold their edge a really long time.
[0]: https://shun.kaiusa.com/classic-serrated-utility-6.html?srsl...
> It will be interesting to see the knife in the hands of real chefs.
Not really? I feel like this is for the other people, the folks who don't have the training to use a chefs knife super well. I'd rather see a decent home cook compare it to their knife in general prep.
The two things that stood out to me:
"The best tools shouldn't only be accessible to the pros" but his knife costs more than every knife in that database.
The weight is listed in their help articles as 330g. I also think that handle is chunkier than a typical high end chef's knife. It may be easier to cut things with it, but I think your hand and arm are going to get tired of using it more quickly than with a regular knife at ~100g less.
And I realize these fare worse than the high end japanese and german knives, but it's hard to get excited about a $400 knife you can't put in the dishwasher when you can get a perfectly credible fibrox knife for about a tenth of that, which doesn't require charging and can tolerate 'careless home cook' levels of abuse.
I don't think anyone who cares about the cutting experience would put a knife into a dishwasher.
I'm not disputing that, and it's kind of my point. Most home cooks (I would bet millions) are not worrying about "the cutting experience" when they are making dinner. They are using a knife to cut up vegetables or slice meat or whatever. Then they are putting that knife in the dishwasher. Not all of them, but most.
I think my other points matter more. I think people who are invested in the experience as you suggest care about more than just the edge and finish, they care about the weight and balance and feel as well. I think this knife is probably worse on those qualities.
I don't mean to say this knife sucks or that this guy is dumb. It's a cool knife, and he's clearly not dumb. I just think this is more a passion project curiosity kind of thing than a useful product addressing a large market need. Maybe a future mass market version (cheaper steel, stamped, more contoured handle) would change my mind.
> Most home cooks (I would bet millions) are not worrying about "the cutting experience"
Indeed, and they won't buy the knife at this price anyway. My point is that not being dishwasher-safe does not matter for ~everyone. If they care, they won't do it; if they don't, they won't buy it.
Yeah the handle was the first thing I saw here that gave me pause. The handle shape matters a lot!
Though: do. not. put. your. $300. knife. in. the. dishwasher.
I felt the collective cringe from everyone reading that comment :).
For those of us who aren't knowledgeable in this field, what happens if you do?
It's hard to do irreparable damage to the steel of a knife. It's just an inert lump of metal. But you could fuck up the handle. Theoretically, the detergent could dull your edge. If you don't isolate your knife and it rattles around, that'll definitely dull it. Mostly: it should only take a couple seconds to clean off your knife in the sink.
> It's hard to do irreparable damage to the steel of a knife.
Sadly not impossible, I've 'lost' (they're still in the back of a drawer) two good knives to idiots attempting to pry apart frozen chops and steaks .. each case snapped a good inch from the tip.
Not damage from a dishwasher and not damage the edge I realize, but worth mention as a tale of caution.
I shared this with my tech friends:
“This has all the hallmarks of a product that’s going to be disappointing but I’m so optimistic it won’t be.”
I’m seriously hopefuls it works because vibroblades (I mean, “progressive knives” and “high frequency blade”) are awesome and the timelines of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Metal Gear are getting closer. Which may, or may not be a good thing.
Well we know this tech works because there are already ultrasonic cutters in medical and industrial equipment. So it’s more about whether they implemented it well, rather than some new fundamental discovery.
Is it realistic to have enough power in such a small form factor for this effect?
Feel free to correct me if I’m off base, but it doesn’t seem like the robot is actually slicing. Looks more like it’s just mashing the blade into the tomato. In this case I can see how the vibration can make up for the lack of slicing action. Ie sliding the blade across the tomato.
My question is: would there still be an improvement if they used a slicing action?
I was surprised by that too. The Shun did surprisingly well in the real world test despite lower scores on the other two categories.
A slight tangent but I find sharpness tests often don’t represent the experience at the macro level, but it’s easily benchmarked and quantified.
As an example are tons of people pushing Feather or Astra or similar ultra sharp shaving razors. I bought a ton of sample packs the ones I liked the most were Kai, which are considered relatively dull, but have properties which make the overall experience better (I recall reading they’re thicker and vibrate less during cutting).
To me that makes this knife cutting benchmark more attractive than sharpness or retention, but I still have questions about technique used in the benchmarks, and how that affects knife performance (e.g. I would never try to cut bread by just pressing down as this move does).
The nerdy sales pitch got me excited about a knife. Also, I have to wonder if the name is a deliberate nod to the Seattle Supersonics...
I can see why one would use a serrated knife to cut bread, but what knife would one use to cut cheese other than a chef's knife?
Jacques Pépin suggested at [0] "basically you need three knives":
Of those, other than the chopping/chef's knife, I imagine that one could generally slice cheese with the utility knife (depending on the cheese, of course).[0] https://youtu.be/nffGuGwCE3E?t=12
A Santoku or other knife with scalloped sides do well. There are also in fact, cheese knifes, for cutting and serving that are popular for self service cheese boards. Wire is also popular for cutting large block cheeses.
There are cheese knives that are either very high aspect or have a holes so nothing will stick.
Ironically, the cheeses I would cut with a chef's knife are exactly the ones that aren't going to stick to the knife. The ones that get messy are just as easy to cut with a butter knife.
(Amusingly, butter is one of the demos in this video.)
Nobody uses a chef's knife to cut cheese?
Ahh, but now they could. No need for specialized cheese-cutting tools with this knife, presumably.
Ditto for bread knives.
Ginsu confused us about use cases.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wzULnlHr8w&t=25s
One obvious question is where on that list the product in question would fall.
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.
My question for this product is entirely different: It's well-known that ultrasonic sound can still damage your hearing despite being inaudible or nearly so. Does this?
The problems were even bigger than that - they tested factory sharpness and factory geometry that often are shit. And not thinning and sharpening them properly. Let alone that the steel on the factory edge has high chance to fatigued/softer than the rest.
I personally watched Scott spend years working on the project and obsessively iterating on the steel, the vibration pattern, the circuitry, the handle, and the form factor. Scott is a hacker, one of us for sure. I mean, the guy built a custom robot just to measure cutting efficiency...
The knife is amazing and exactly as shown in the video. Rand Fishkin has a nice short on LinkedIn trying out the knife too. I think he shows one his (sharp) kitchen knives slicing through a lemon, then the Ultrasonic. It's astounding.
Disclaimer: I am a (tiny) angel investor in Seattle Ultrasonics.
Does that video show him doing actual prep? I 100% believe he made a knife that can make a paper-thin slice of a lemon. But that's not what a chef's knife is for. As someone who thinks the world would be a better place if this product worked and was successful: for god's sake record someone processing an onion. That's what matters.
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
So, I just watched this, and he's not processing a shallot, he's just slowly talking thin slices off it. Also: even when my MAC is rolled over and needs a hone, it still does a lime just as well.
I'm not saying this knife doesn't work just that I'm noticing that none of the videos show it working.
Seriously, it is only a little bit of an exaggeration to say that the entire job of a chef's knife is to quickly process an onion. What's especially weird is that even an inert knife with its factory edge will show well in an onion dice video!
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..
Free idea: put this tech in a mandoline slicer.
Even the best tend to struggle with consistency and can only go so thin due to all the friction. An ultrasonic mandoline that can overcome all that would probably fly off the shelves and better match the original industrial intent.
On one hand I would buy that instantly. On the other hand, it’s already missing small pieces thanks to my current mandolin. Not sure I want to make my scariest utensil scarier.
I think if this can keep a knife effectively sharper than the equivalent nice steel with less maintenance, then it’s going to find a market.
I’m a nerd, but Ive found that once I’ve mastered a hobby I eventually gravitate towards convenience, optimizing my time over absolute performance. I’ve built five PCs in my life, and now I only own a macbook. I spent loads of time optimizing my hifi setup, and now most of my apartment is sonos. And I have probably 1k worth of nice japanese knives + whetstones, that I would happily replace with a single knife that needs little to no upkeep.
I am like you, but my concern with this knife is lifespan. My Japanese knives will last a lifetime. This knife has no warranty that I could find, but how long do we expect it to live? If it’s 10 years or so, I could be happy with it.
This 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.
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 edge with a softer back is necessary for a strong knife that will cut well. This is a function of heat treatment. A knife that is tempered the same the whole blade is fine for smaller knives but it’s possible to break the tips or edges off larger knives. From there metallurgy affects the edge retention and how easy it is to sharpen. Plain 440C will make a fine enough knife if heat treated properly but can also make blades that can’t be made particularly sharp and can’t easily be sharpened. These knives will be very stainless so this is why poor quality and good quality knives will be made in 440C. The next tier of knives beyond singular steel forging will be a very hard edge steel wrapped around a softer core steel. The sky is the limit from there in terms of metallurgy. The highest end knives will use powdered steel where precisely composed steel bars are made using uniform grains of steel and other attractive metals and doping materials as part of the forging process.
Once it gets home a good edge has to be maintained.
People do all sorts of things to dull perfectly good cutlery (I cringe when I see people use glass or marble serving/cheese boards as a cutting board). A off hand toss of a knife into a sink can roll the edge.
The worst offense is when I see someone at a farmers market with the grinding wheel “sharpening” a knife by crudely removing the hardened steel edge of a knife. Good luck cutting much with the softer core steel or softer tempered back steel.
While having an Evangelion style ultrasonic knife is cool, it’s certainly not necessary and I expect it can be ruined in many of the same ways a $400 traditional knife can be.
At home I have Henkels for the holidays and some forged food service knife’s for general use. When visitors throw the food service knives into the sink I just take out the sharpening stones and don’t cry all that much.
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?
Knives are already high tech and the GP’s point that you don’t need an ultrasonic knife is valid even if “QVC product” is inaccurate. They’re not just hunks of steel. Sharp knives can be dulled by abuse which something that vibrates will be vulnerable to as well.
This is akin to the already established very expensive powdered steel knives. Do you need this to have a sharp knife? Nope. Is anyone wrong for wanting it? No.
This product isn't about not having to sharpen your knife.
It's about a knife that is ~equivalently sharp to begin with, but slices with less force and less sticking, and can therefore slice things more exactly/easily than otherwise.
Of course you don't need it, but it's fundamentally different from existing knives, which you seem to not be acknowledging. When you say this is akin to "powdered steel knives", no it isn't. Powdered steel is about hardness. Nothing to do with ease of slicing or lack of sticking.
So you're talking about things that have nothing to do with this particular technology.
I’m not taking a negative view on this knife or technology. I believe you’re misunderstanding the intention of my color commentary? “Do not need” is not equivalent to “this is terrible.”
Powdered metallurgy, to parry your point, is not about hardness but about having the most precise composition of a metal. I.e you can have better wearing 440C, better machinable 440C, etc. most of this was intended for manufacturing high end industrial equipment. For kitchen knives it’s unnecessary even if it’s cool. It’s incrementally better but like this product it’s not necessary.
Similarly this isn’t “new technology” aside from the packaging of industrial technology into a chefs knife. You can get X-Acto knife sized versions of this already. Ceramic blades came from industrial alumina production. Cool, not necessary, but nothing wrong if it’s your jam.
The classic “QVC knife” is the Ginsu knife which has a lot of the same claims/qualities from a far. It’s an implementation of pattern welded steel and when you use a microscope you’ll see its thousands of serrated edges. Their ad shows the user cutting a can and then thinly slicing a tomato. Works fine until the edge gets rolled and since it’s cheaply processed steel (lacking the points of good construction I mentioned above), that’s usually what happens. I’d expect the company this whole discussion is about doing a lot better here since they’re not trying to sell a three knife set for $29.95 with free shipping.
My point about things being easily damaged with mishandling is that most people simply don’t handle knives well enough to see a benefit from high end knives, not that they aren’t nice/better/valid/different/etc. All of that can be true and the knife no longer cut because the edge is damaged. A Ferrari is a technologically complex car but not a very good car if the tires are all flat. If this thing doesn’t have an edge it isn’t going to cut well.
This is a point they make on their own site:
> Is the knife dishwasher safe?
> Updated 13 days ago
>
> No, but neither is any sharp knife. Dishwasher detergents contain micro-abrasives that dull and chip away at knife edges. If you enjoy using sharp knives, never put them in the dishwasher!
This is actually a more strict take than I have on edge retention, but I wouldn’t complain if my cutlery were treated this way.
Like I said a few posts up, I have knives that cost several hundred dollars. I keep the cheap ones out so I don’t cry when they get lobbed into a sink with the dirty dishes. When sharp they all cut very well. The expensive ones are better at edge retention and can be made a little sharper. After a friend helps clean or cuts some cheese on the cheese board the knife that was used is dull and not a great tool, be it the $30 food service knife or the $400 Henkels knife. You just can’t cheat physics.
This is a semantic argument. This product smacks of being a garbage kitchen gadget. Whether or not it's a QVC product, it certainly looks like cheap white-label alibaba junk. Just look at that handle. Did they just slap a knifeblade into an electric nosehair trimmer?
I'd try one out of professional/academic curiosity (I'm a chef), but am highly skeptical of this product. It looks like absolute trash.
All the people saying this knife does anything remarkable clearly have no experience in maintaining a decent knife blade. 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).
Having said all that, you won't find an accurate takedown of a product that isn't on the market yet. Still, I can't help but wonder if the person behind this had dedicated that effort towards helping mitigate the water crisis, deforestation, or any number of other inarguably nobler pursuits.
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 cut through bread easily without a serrated edge? What I’m seeing in the video is a lot more versatile. But I can see needing a smaller utility knife still.
Why on earth would I care if a potato sticks to my blade, and why would I need to atomize lemon juice with my knife?
I worked in some of the best kitchens on the planet and for every hipster with a blue paper #2 carbon steel hand made japanese chefs knife there was an old gray beard with a row of old busted victorinoxes hanging on the wall. Both of these cooks would filet a halibut beautifully.
It isn't the knife.
Because it's annoying af when you're slicing potatoes.
> 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.
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.
It depends on the bread. Many breads are basically impossible to cut properly with a straight edge knife. They end up disfigured worse than what you’re describing with serrated knives.
Have you seen this knife do any of these things in action? Will it continue to do so? Nobody has, or will, until this gadget hits the market.
I remain skeptical in spite of your weird defensive reaction. I'm speaking about how a product appears to me as a professional. Not attcking you personally (unless it's your product... then I think you should do something good for society with your time)
> All the people saying this knife does anything remarkable clearly have no experience in maintaining a decent knife blade.
Yes? I mean, that's one of the main points of the gadget, as said in the advertisement.
The blade must be sharpen regardless, the apex won't stay sharp on its right own. The vibration does help but it doesn't do any actual cutting if you dull the blade.
does nobody keep their knives in a pyramid anymore?
Is that what they meant to say? "This looks like a gadget"? Then why did they say "coming from someone living nearby the home of QVC"?
I think basically the whole thread is acknowledging that this looks like a gadget!
Is there video online of any knife cutting off the ends of chives in mid-air?
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.
Sadly Howard Schultz moved the Ultrasonics to Oklahoma City a while back.
Are you arguing that what’s good for the belt-loop is good for the hand?
What?
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.
Its my understanding of knife sharpening that carbon steel is easier to sharpen then stainless and that softer steels are more difficult then high hrc steel due to burr removal.
I think a lot of German knives are moving to the same angle now
VG10 in Tojiro DP is stainless steel, and even stainless goes up to 64+ HRC.
i've had both, and the reality is that they're both just steel -- a good grind will make any shit steel knife cut like a 700 dollar Japanese blade for a few days.
(and yes the Japanese steel dulls too. No cheating physics.)
In the video he says he spent a lot of time making prototypes and perfecting the design.
Is he lying? He shows images of the prototypes. Did he create fake prototypes?
It is only eWaste if you think our future does not resemble the Fallout games.
But if you do this will be excellent tech for melee weapons.
now I want to see ultrasonic fencing
The guy has a YouTube video where he claims to have spent 6 years working on this product. Is he lying?
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
how do you sharpen it?
I use a knock-off of the edgepro I got for $30 online, with a nice set of compatible whetstones that click into the assembly that were $20 online. I did what everyone else does and hotglued some magnets underneath the piece you hold the knife on.
I tried a compatible strop that clicks in but it's not worth it imo; just use a normal strop.
Whetstones, pretty cheap only and not as hard as it seems.
just want to point out that maintaining a knife is a whole hobby that requires a time investment of learning the skill and storage of additional tools and materials. i'm surprised at all the apparent knife enthusiast posts trashing this device. I take my victorinox (which is absolutely nothing special and surprises me that it costs $60+ dollars) to the farmers market for sharpening but sharpness isn't even the problem. Potatoes in particular stick to the blade like a strong magnet and it takes me 5x longer to prep. I enjoy cooking but not chopping endless veggies and i'm hoping this thing can carry some of that weight without looking like i'm using an oversized electric toothbrush.
> just want to point out that maintaining a knife is a whole hobby that requires a time investment of learning the skill and storage of additional tools and material.
You're right that's a hobby. But the hobby's definition of "proper maintenance" and what it "requires" is basically just people nerding out about things that don't matter the slightest in the real world.
To maintain a kitchen knife so that it cuts a tomato without squishing it, you don't need a book on knife science. Further, that nerdery is probably actively harmful, because instead of simple solutions, people are told they need an inspection microscope and a variety of jigs and other implements. So they buy an objectively bad electric sharpener and move on.
> just want to point out that maintaining a knife is a whole hobby that requires a time investment of learning the skill and storage of additional tools and materials.
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.
Yes as I mentioned I use often-recommended knives (victorinox, shun) and have them occasionally sharpened professionally and at least in my case the ultrasonic knife appears to solve some very real problems that knife maintenance cannot.
it takes no skill to make a blunt knife sharper. To make a sharp knife sharper, sure, but in a good vast majority of home knife situations, just doing anything with any flat sharpening surface is an improvement.
I can attest to this as I have improved knifes day one of trying despite my lack of any sort of skill
I decided it was hard and never got very good at sharpening. Now I've got a Chef's Choice XV and my knives are sharper than they've ever been.
Sharpening a knife to r/sharpening standards is hard. But just honing frequently and occasionally using a cheap sharpener will get you further than 95% of home chefs.
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.
I did this too! I love being able to buy a large chunk of deli meat and slice off what I need at whatever width I want.
Home cook deli slicers are the most slept on, underrated pantry upgrade.
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
You need one diamond two-sided plate, holder for it, and a stropping leather. All of that can be bought for $60 on Amazon.
This is enough to get your knives to be sharp enough to shave hair.
Time investment is more individual. It took me about 3 hours to get good enough.
Yes, and a pass with a honing steel every day to maintain the cutting edge between proper whetstones sharpening every few months.
don't use honing steel. at best it doesn't do anything, at worst it damages your knife.
here's a closer look at it with a microscope. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4ReQ83CZOQ
just a guy abusing his knife to prove he can't fix it using the wrong tool badly
Ceramic honing rod. Works amazingly well and is appropriate for japanese knives.
do not buy those garbage amazon whetstones. Buy a diamond sharpening 'stone'.
Wet stones are hard. Rolling ones are easy albeit “real” knife aficionados don’t like it.
They're really not. All you need is an angle guide you stick to the knife. Something like https://setamono.co.za/products/knife-sharpening-angle-retai...
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.
Thats 2-3 extras over rolling sharpeners
I used to sharpen my straight-knife planer blades, planing irons, chisels, and knives with whetstones / water stones. It was too big of a pain in the ass over time, so I switched to diamond stones.
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.
Same advice - don't use the soaking stones. Nowadays they are plenty of decent quality diamond stones (or ceramic ones)
Whetstones were hard 20 years ago. Right now there is abundance of quality info and products. The community actually figured out idiotproof and effective ways to deburr, to strop, resin bound diamond stones are affordable (or even cheap if you just buy the abrasive from China and go the diy route).
In my case I just wait for the sharpening knife guy who pass once a week in my neighborhood. It is quite easy as I am working from home and he plays those distinctive panpipes notes.
That definitely sounds like Mexico.
This happens in Italy aswell.
and Spain
And China
Honing is 1,000x more important than sharpening.
When it does come time to sharpen, I constantly see places offering knife sharpening services, and they’re usually cheap enough. Or you could get a gizmo that does a mediocre job (and shaves away far too much material) if you just want to get it done. Or you could learn to do it yourself which isn’t that hard or time-consuming but is somewhat of a labor of love.
What exactly is the difference between honing and sharpening.
Making the edge is sharpening. Removing the ripples in it is honing.
Carefully? Professionally? Except which knife stall at which farmers market wants the job?
Learning to sharpen the (correct) knife (for the task) will do as much or more for the chef who struggles here.
Prepping 1000 lemons? An ultrasonic knife is not your answer.
AUS-10 steel is fairly easy to sharpen, so stones are a good option but I prefer diamond sharpeners myself.
umm, you raise a valid concern, afaict, however, e-waste is kind of a taboo word around here, or? Or maybe just another part of the 'inevitable' belief system.
Like, how about that _planned obsolescence_ of a vast majority of consumer electronics hardware? (If that ain't the case, would be happen to learn otherwise from someone with better knowledge.)
I guess with knives the thing is it’s very easy and cheap to get a version that works well lasts pretty much forever. Makes the other options look worse in comparison.
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.
> using a $10 knife that is only reasonably well sharpened is probably 90% as good
I think the value proposition is in the idea that you don't have to sharpen this knife as often as with a normal knife, and that the performance is consistent.
The non stickiness is also a huge value proposition, because that is an annoying and time consuming aspect of any cutting.
I think it's because it seems like a Juicero to anyone who uses knives to make dinner regularly. We're fascinated by tech, and sure, I'd try this, but I bet anyone who has prepped with a knife for hours per week is probably pretty skeptical on the practicality here.
A sharpened piece of metal has been reliable for thousands of years and will continue to remain so. For new tech, I am also a fan of the ceramic knives out there for vegetables, as they hold a razors edge much longer than metal (albeit are far more brittle - I use them for veggies only, no meat).
One can buy a decent steel chef's knife, a ceramic one, lose them both, buy them again, buy a sharpening stone and a strop for the price of one of these. On one hand, the sci-fi emergence of the vibroblade or something in the kitchen would be cool. On the other, it could be a $500 vibrating slapchop[1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxGn2Egekic
> It's expensive (but not really, only compared to knives - a $500 GPU isn't expensive).
No, it's really expensive. $400 is nearly a week's pay for an hourly worker in much of the US. For many on this site it might be less than a day's labor but that's not the general case.
The lack of trust is probably because knives seem to be a favorite product of shysters. Selling expensive knives that promise the moon and wow the audience with cool knife tricks just reeks of fast talking late-night infomercial salesman trying to get over on grandma. The tech looks cool, but the presentation is off-putting.
$500 isn’t even out of the question for a great knife, it feels like about the right price point for the product.
It's the lack of pragmatism.
"Sure, people claim the kitchen knife has been a solved problem for hundreds of years, but what if there was a kitchen knife that had a battery inside and cost $500?"
And if this version of the knife doesn't connect to the cloud, the next one will.
It all seems quite gimmicky.
That's cynicism.
Everything has pros and cons. You haven't said a single pro. You haven't added any real cons to what I said, and made up hypothetical ones.
It's a sales pitch so you're saying why you wouldn't buy it. I'm not ordering one either, 500 is a bit steep for me. If he just showed off the technology, I suspect people here would be more enthusiastic about it, even if you wouldn't bother to buy it yourself.
I'm not saying you're wrong (at the price point), but that the framing of whether we're going to buy it is a result of the marketing.
> if this version of the knife doesn't connect to the cloud, the next one will.
That's just ugly cynicism. And I'm willing to bet a good amount of money the "next one" from this company won't. But it doesn't matter because this one doesn't and we're talking about this one, not some hypothetical that may never arrive.
If the rechargeable vibrator-knife becomes a fixture of kitchens around the world, it will prove the accusation of 'cynicism'. Until then, whether it's cynicism or sobriety is a matter of opinion.
Kudos if they develop a knife that blunts itself when your subscription expires.
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.
We are usually skeptical. And I don't know why a weird ad for a smart-knife has gotten to the top-page of HN.
We don't like "buzz" and "hype"... if it's truly a great technology we can buy one a year from now. Not trusting a commercial to be honest isn't undue skepticism.
Well said.
Maybe I'm just a sci-fi nerd who loves innovation, but this is so cool!
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?
Ultrasonic knives are used commercially, this is an attempt at a mass market by making it cheaper and packaging it in a more familiar form.
> 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...
I thought I recognised the name - Bourbon Moth is the guy who faked a video of oily rags self-igniting to make a video to advertise fireproof bins for woodworking.
This one: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gqi2cNCKQY
Debunking: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtU3bYyCtA
Never heard of either of these Youtubers but I've seen tons of cans of stains and such with warnings about potential self-ignition if left on rags in the wrong conditions...
Yes. Learn from my mistake--I almost burned down my apartment by leaving linseed oil rags unattended.
It's interesting that AvE devoted multiple videos to debunking oily rags but believes 9/11 was an inside job.
Writer Jack London's mansion,The Wolf House, that he was building up in Sonoma county was destroyed by a fire that investigators later attributed to the spontaneous combustion of oil-soaked rags in the dining room...
Expertise & ignorance alike don’t carry across domains.
> but believes 9/11 was an inside job
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.
AvE experienced mental breakdown around Canadian trucker anti-lockdown movement. Never been the same since.
A pocket chisel is very much not the same thing as a kitchen knife.
Me, immediately: ooh Star Wars vibroblade!
knife is already perfect
Honest question, does it aerosolize pathogens that cause food-borne illness?
Interesting question, short answer - almost certainly not any more or less than you are already, and to the degree it does, it almost certainly is making things better and not worse.
First - ~all food illness causing bacteria is denser than air. about 1000x denser. On its own, it won't float.
Second - almost all cutting motions are still going to throw it around. So you are already doing this when you cut or chop food. You are slicing cell walls, etc, releasing pathogens that exist inside. But it doesn't like aerosolize in the sense of floating around, because it's denser than air[1]. How far it goes depends on the cutting motion, etc.
Third - does ultrasonic make it better or worse - well, again, it doesn't overall float, so it's really a question of does it do anything to make go farther/less far, and does it do anything to destroy or the opposite?
44khz (used here) is a common ultrasonic frequency in cleaning[2] and leak detection.
In fact, it's also used to remove bacterial cells from surfaces at higher intensities (and detect them at lower intensities). It's actually one of the major ways non-heat pasteurization is done.
While it's not 100% at removing individual bacterial cells, even at super high intensity, ultrasonic frequencies are both detrimental to cell growth, and as used here, will cause lots and lots of bacterial death because of everything from cavitation to pressure changes to instantaneous heat to you name it.
Does it fling pathogens any further? Maybe? I'm sure there are some situations in which it will. But they don't seem normal. Like if you are just slicing raw meat or chicken, it's hard to see how it could do that.
Overall, it probably helps more than it hurts. As far as i can tell, it's not even a close question.
[1] It is possible to get the bacteria to float in air anyway due to brownian motion and other mechanisms, but it still seems overblown - the percent of food borne illness caused by inhaling bacteria vs eating underprepared food it is so small they don't even bother to track it. This knife is not going to change that.
[2] If you google it, you will also discover it's emitted by fearful rats. I don't know if the knife also scares rats away.
That's good point, aerosolized raw chicken meat water doesn't sound like a good time.
> That's good point
Why is it a good point?
Do you get disease at a rate we care about from smelling a fart? Or smelling raw chicken? Or cooking chicken and the aerosolize particles off that?
The tool seems to melt going off similar tech - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNwHDWlA7gE
Why does you brain think it's a good point other than you want to be negative? Because nihilism is cooler than thinking?
Dentists do ultrasonic scaling, which a ultrasonic water spray and are not dropping like flies.
What is the good point here, tell us more, love to hear it.
Dentists did avoid aerosolising procedures when COVID protections were in place, along with upgrading to FFP3 masks and full face visors.
Good news - ~all food borne pathogens are much denser than air. Not like slightly, about 1000x denser.
You are going to have about as much aerosolized raw chicken meat water (ARCMW) whether you use an ultrasonic knife or not.
The ARCMW touched by the ultrasonic knife will probably have significantly less alive bacteria than the stuff touched by the regular knife.
Great question. It does seem like you would not want to use it for raw chicken.
As far as i can know, the science does not support this answer :) In fact, it is probably the opposite - you should definitely use it on raw chicken.
So it is essentially an electric tomato knife.
To be fair, plants are where you really need a sharp knife. There's a reason why they do these tests with tomatoes.
A good quality well sharpened knife already works incredibly well, doesn't cost $500, doesn't need to be recharged, and isn't going to be e-waste in 5 years (when the battery fails).
It's a cool idea, and I hope it is commercially successful, but not for me.
This thing is $399, which is on the expensive side of prestige chef knives, but by no means the extravagant side of it. People who buy knives that cost more than $150 generally buy lots of knives, and this is priced for that market.
But it's not priced for the market of people who buy lots of knives. Because those who buy lots of knives aren't going to be interested in some mediocre knife with a vibration motor attached to it.
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.
Yeah I mean, the product is either going to work or it isn't going to work. But the only people who are going to be early adopters for this are knife nerds. Obviously, you'll get a knife that r/chefknives admires for cheaper than that!
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.
Why do you think the knife is mediocre?
It’s $499 with the wireless charger. I see that the charger isn’t required. You can take the battery out of the knife and charge it by USB. I would correct my comment, but it is no longer possible for me to edit it.
The battery is comes out for recharging, so replacing a dead battery should be trivial
It's a proprietary form factor, so you're gambling on replacements being available down the line. I don't think it'll be easy to rebuild the battery pack without compromising the casing.
Given the battery specs and the form factor of the products, they could have used a 14500 cell that retails for $5. That's not as much recurring revenue as charging $80 for something proprietary though.
3d printer and couple of cells and I guess a board will get the job done.
You will have to print it from something like polyamide or polycarbonate, definitely not PLA
Or chuck it out as e-waste and buy the shiny new one
The dead battery is still e-waste and recycling isn't a magically neutral activity that brings back one new product out of an old one with no loss or energy spent.
This looks really cool!
I was just curious about two things - seems there might be some knife aficionados or experts here!
1. Sharpening - As a home cook, who doesn't know a lot about knives/sharpening - how hard would this be to maintain? Would it be plausible to get some basic home sharpening gear, and maintain this myself? Or should I take it to a professional knife sharpener - and if so, how do I even know if they're a good one, and won't damage the blade, or perhaps are good, but somehow get the blade out of "tune" etc?
2. Safety wise - is there anything at all to be concerned about with ultrasonic 40Khz blades? Should I be wearing any hearing protection when using this? (Context - I have hearing loss in both ears, and wear hearing aids - keen to preserve my remaining hearing, and am understandably cautious about this kind of thing for my family and me).
We made it! We’ve finally invented vibroblades!
I was searching for this comment. All the snark in this thread, I’m just excited that we’ve invented working vibroblades lol
Now if they could get the vibrations by shooting a bullet along the edge, we'd also have gunblades!
the next version will come with plasma micro jets ejection from the cutting edge - convenient for civilian use. I'm also wandering about an array of shaped micro-charges on the edge - should be able to cut through several millimeters of steel in one move, etc. so a soldier can cut though an opponent's ballistic vest or a into an lightly armored IFV.
A shaped charge is sadly the opposite of sharp so it would be a one time use blade that would be dull before and after
That one use would be anything but dull though
You can have it sharp with shaped charges array sitting a bit deeper and sideways, and new edge breaking out as side effect of shaped charges exploding, rinse and repeat, about 5 times for a regularly sized sword.
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)
On safety, if the blade is vibrating and I put my finger perpendicularly under it, will it cut the skin?
They show the knife being touched from the side but of course that's safe
Hard to watch the tiny video. Cannot be made full screen. Rotating phone sideways the website header obscures the video.
edit: https://youtu.be/cXjbSVt9XNM
> 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
I hate that default click action is mute and that the cursor is replaced with speaker.
I actually thought that was a neat touch, since that's one of my most frequent interactions with an online video. But it needs to be overridden when the pointer is over the other controls. I couldn't scrub through the video on desktop without repeatedly muting/unmuting.
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.
While I think this is neat, I doubt the added complexity of the device, extra space required for storage of charger and the chore of charging it are worth the benefit of a slightly better, easier slice. Might be nice for people with certain disabilities though.
How much do you actually cook though? As a former professional chef I still do a lot of cooking and I’d love one of these and any storage trade off looks absolutely worth while.
A lot of the cool stuff we have now started off for accessibility.
If it works at least as well as the current electric knives, it let's you cut things you'd usually not try to cut.
Thin slicing frozen meat for instance, carving pumpkins, cutting bones etc.
I think it would be fine as u would need a lot less knives so one bespoke one with a charger wouldn’t be that big of a deal
Doesn't bespoke mean one of a kind and/or custom made for a specific purpose? I don't think this is bespoke. It's a gimmick.
This is the best demo video ever! Congrats on reinventing the knife!
Have you watched any Cold Steel videos?
Yeah, have to say the video is pretty good. I came in expecting the typical shopping channel pitch, but it did a very good job explaining the things the knife can and can't do. It really helps that it's presented by the inventor himself.
Still won't buy one but still.
Pretty kewl, but, for some reason, this old site comes to mind...
https://www.tumblr.com/weputachipinit
Thanks for the share, hadn't seen that before.
why does tumblr make me sign in to see posts
The comments in this thread remind me of the famous HN Dropbox announcement.
To 99% of people, “just sharpen your knife regularly” is about as realistic as “just set up a Linux FTP server with rsync and…”
I think it’s really cool, but not sure about the button design (seams to trap germs) and placement (index finger is not where I naturally exert pressure when cutting with a kitchen knife).
Also would be nice if it can be fitted to existing blades as handle retrofit, but I understand that might not be possible to properly tune the vibrations.
For $500+ you can get a really, REALLY nice Damascus steel chef's knife with a beautiful patina and wood handle. Yes: it requires a bit more maintainable but nice things often require some work. When it's properly honed & sharpened, it'll cut just as well as this.
So you're basically saying that you can spend as much money to get a knife that will cut as well but requires regular work put into it, whereas this doesn't? I think that's the whole pitch here...
This kind of thing is what I come to HN for.
This guy did a 6 year multidisciplinary grind to produce a stunning consumer product. Exemplary
I work with some bigger ultrasonic cutters/welders and the thing I didn't see in the video was the horrible noise they make. He says the knife makes no noise but they also don't have the noise on for the shots of the bigger ones so I'm suspicious.
Sound is on for the tomato shot in the beginning of the video, FYI. It is extremely quiet.
I watched the video and this seems pretty neat. Don't want to knock it or be negative. He's definitely right that most people's knives are dull – when I use knives in other people's homes I often just want to cry at how dull they are (also: pans – how the hell do so many people have dented damaged pans?) But you really don't need to splurge out €329 to have reasonably sharp knives.
All you need is a sharpening steel and use it once or twice after every usage. Even a cheap knife will last for years while remaining reasonable sharp. Mine was €6 or thereabouts at Tesco two years ago and is more than sharp enough.
Of course more expensive knifes (ultrasonic or not) are better and can hold an edge longer. You can spend more time, effort, and money on making them sharper than just a quick use of a cheap sharpening steel. If you want to spend the extra money: go for it! But for a normal home cook: you can go a long way with consistent use of a €10 sharpening steel.
Ultrasonic 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 constant motion heats up the blade, to the point of melting thermoplastics or causing the edge to lose temper if you're pushing a bit too hard, cutting the wrong material, etc.
It's your money, but I suspect this knife is more of a hassle, and requires more care, than a regular kitchen knife. And let's face it, the coolness factor aside, how often do you struggle to cut chicken, tomatoes, or bread? If you do, it's probably because your knife is dull, and this knife will get dull too.
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.
I'm an amateur cook, my immediate question was how much the vibration and heating will affect vegetable and meat oxidation and cell damage on the cut surface.
Could this improve the texture and flavor of certain foods? Like make garlic taste even more garlicky? Or could it cause an apple slice to brown faster? Can it be used to slice cooked fish as if it were sashimi? Etc.
If a site like SeriousEats does a product review I hope they focus on qualitative taste, and possibilities for enhancing cooking techniques, not merely saving time/effort to do something.
all the comparisons in the vid show knives being pushed through the food. that's not a good way to use a knife.
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.
It depends completely on the knife. A nakiri or a bunka wants you to push cut, for instance.
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.
That’s not necessary with an ultrasonic knife and would generally be a waste of time. The vibrations take the place of needing to slice, rather than chop. This knife is not meant to be used like a normal chef’s knife.
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.
> That’s not necessary with an ultrasonic knife and would generally be a waste of time
i was just saying they compare it to normal knives being used incorrectly.
It certainly would be nice to have three or four independent reviews from people with knife skills.
If it helps, the inventor worked at other kitchen product companies like Sansaire (founder) and Anova. And at other places in the cooking world. So they’re not entirely unknown either.
No, that doesn't help. Product managers sometimes overhype their products.
Independent. Reviews. People with knife skills. Some degree of communications ability would be nice, too.
The parent comment asked for a second opinion, that's not even related.
It's not made for people with knife skills.
It absolutely is. I’m a former chef and have great knife skills but would love one of these.
What would it do that your current, well-maintained, very sharp knife doesn’t?
drop potato slices with less fuss
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.
Get a granton or perforated blade instead
Ok congrats!
Hmm, that seems a bit snarky =(.
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...
I’m a former chef too and have knife skills but, no. Overripe tomatoes, grapes, carrots, meat near cartilage? No problem at all with the right tool.
How well does it cut frozen food?
Probably not great, otherwise they would have shown it, but being able to cut frozen food properly would be a game changer. The only things I found working are saws, and they are messy.
I've invested close to a thousand dollars in sharpening tools over the years. I keep my knives super sharp as a hobby more than anything. I'd still love to have one of these in the drawer for certain tasks. It's ugly and clunky but I'd probably still use it on a semi-regular basis for warm breads, cheeses, etc. I bet the action would help with sharpening as well.
I do wonder if a tuning fork or 'mass on a stick' hidden in the tang could provide enough vibration to help with the sticking. You'd probably have to smack it with every cut but it's so rarely a problem that would be fine.
Oh wow - would love to know what you got for sharpening, or what you'd suggest for the home cook?
When you say ugly/clunky - I'm guessing you mean it's a bit heavier, or the weight will be off compared to a good high-end chef's knife? (I don't have anything like that, haha).
I did note on their FAQ they say to never activate the blade whilst sharpening:
https://seattleultrasonics-ceizljlxnpt.gorgias.help/en-US/ho...
> Do not activate the ultrasonics during sharpening - this can damage both the blade and your sharpening stones, as the ultrasonic movement is too aggressive and not evenly distributed across the entire cutting edge. Also, reshaping the blade to a different belly curvature or tip shape can cause it to fall out of tune, so avoid removing more material than you would during normal sharpening.
The concept of the knife is interesting. I could see myself buying one if I had that much money lying around.
Maybe if the home chef who needs a leg up sees this it would prevent them from spending that much or more on more expensive knives and maintenance products. For those of us who know our way around the kitchen I’m not sure how much benefit I would get out of it.
Also did anyone think some of the cutting segments, particularly the radish, seemed sped up? The movement of the blade and hand looked a bit unnatural.
This is a boon for elderly losing hand/wrist strength
If you're an amateur and really want to spend this much money, get a good enough knife (e.g. the classic victorinox) and a chef's choice electric sharpener, and you won't have any more issues.
I've read multiple reviews saying the chefs choice sharpeners are basically useless. Having owned 2 of them I can confirm they seem to do almost nothing after the first few times using them.
A few YT knife channels have done deep dives showing why they stop working soon after purchase, the details escape me but I have to agree with the end result....
Somehow after looking at the video, it is hard to believe that it is actually much different than your standard knife.
I want to see what happens when it cuts your finger. Actually, I don't want to see it. But I'm curious.
There are surgical scalpels that are ultrasonic, and they are incredibly sharp when activated. They can cut through skin and tissue like butter!
All I can think is how this would weaponize onion cutting.
And the chopping of serrano peppers.
I 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...
This product is a huge gimmick. Buy a $20 double sided sharpening stone on amazon and you can keep even the cheapest stainless steel knives sharp and chef ready for years. Just basic knife sharpening skills are needed which you can pick up in 10 minutes on YouTube.
Theres a whole class of people who will pay more to not have to maintain things themselves. I bought an EV because they require little maintenance and I also hate filling up.
I have decent knives but have probably never sharpened them properly. If there are more reviews, I'd pick this up.
But I want a ultrasonic knife.
Is this Hacker News or the TV Shopping Network?
I like this vibro-knife “demo” by Neil Blompkamp’s Oats Studios: https://youtu.be/zaeFgSR_DMU
Same vibes, different frequency...
https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1245797052/vintage-60s-phili...
How does this compare to the electric carving knives?
It's ultrasonic; the frequency is much higher while the amplitude is much smaller.
The video mentions that the knife vibrates over 40000 times per second.
Watch the video.
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 interest in how the ultrasonic tech fares.
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?
Ultrasonic cheese wire is an awesome companion idea!
or a sonic cheese wire for chirping cheery tunes while chopping chunks of cheese
A different but far better piece of cutting edge technology is a modern, diamond-encrusted nickel/chrome-plated steel plate.
These things are now so sharp they can bring an edge profile back to a knife in five strokes without even needing lubrication (which is nice as water is a PITA when it causes corrosion between the steel bed and the plating.)
Every knife in your kitchen can be razor sharp in seconds and kept razor sharp whenever you need them to be. IMHO, far more useful than a single digi-vibro-knife.
Example product: Trend 300/1000 diamond sharpening kit.
Agreed. Even a knife with heavy usage only needs a few swipes to realign the edge. Warning though, sharpening things can be addicting. I have a massive straight razor and finishing stone collection. It's a wonderful hobby, but dipping into natural stones gets very expensive
It looks like a very cool product. Though it's too expensive for a regular guy who treats the cooking as a chore.
Super cool! I wonder if it would bother pets
Huh I didn’t even think about this. I’m assuming you mean the frequency is audible to dogs?
That looks really cool. Especially loved the wall of prototypes with raspberry picos etc.
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
when your bag vibrates at airport security but, phew, it's not a sex toy it's ok guys it's just my knife everything's fine
Does the vibration pass through the skin, via the handle?
Umreeka can have geniuses only in tv shows at this point….otherwise we are reinventing knives!!
That non stickiness. I am curious if we do ultrasonic frying pan. Will it be non-stick as well?
Speaking of ultrasonic vibration... Is the audio in the video have noticeable warbles and pops for anyone else? I wonder why that is...
The demo videos show very poor knife skills.
Its capabilities don't look any different from what I've seen in TV ads over the last few decades.
The bit that looks actually interesting to me is buried in the middle of the video - while the ultrasonic switch is on, food visibly falls off the knife instead of sticking to the sides.
As 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.
> in Dune there is an aversion to technology
Just computers, no? IIRC they use knives because the shields stop fast-moving objects like bullets, so you need a slow-moving object like a knife.
Dune's vibrating shield and corresponding weapons.
Raven in Snowcrash? Not quite ultrasonic iirc but extremely thin, like the wire developed in three body problem
It's seemingly quasi-semi-related to The Foundation's 'atomic knives'?
dune?
I would get this for the same reason I'm planning to replace my couch with an optimal-for-moving-through-a-turn couch as soon as I find a carpenter willing to make it. The middle part will be evened-out by a separate, round cushion.
I think a lot of the commentary here is missing the main point — while you may not (I mean, certainly do not) need an ultrasonic chef's knife, it's a cool origin story, and the guy has the receipts! Years of iterations of circuit board design, blade shapes, and the robotic cut-test arm... I personally would enjoy using this in my kitchen just for the hacker vibes.
Although not a pro, or even a good cook, I do like quality knives — but, like most people who develop a casual nice-knife affinity, I then bought a few quality knives, a couple of junk knives to try restoring with a whetstone, a hand-made Japanese knife with my name on it, and... then I had enough kitchen knives to last the rest of my life, and there was no reason to buy any more.
This is the first one I have considered in years. Not because I need it, or because it's necessarily better at cutting must things than the workhorse Sekimagoroku nakiri I use[1] but because it's fucking neat and radiates nerdium waves.
This knife should be celebrated for what it is: basically an epic nerd project. That can also cut at least a few kinds of fruit more easily (or at least more enjoyably).
[1]: KAI model AE5206 (which seems very much like a Shun knife, made by the same company, but cost me only $53)
If you have a sharp knife and a wet cloth under your cutting board chopping is a joy, otherwise it's a dangerous, tedious, and exhausting task that turns so many people away from cooking entirely
My wood cutting board has rubber feet on the bottom. Seems like a much easier solution than handling a bunch of wet towels every day!
Why a wet cloth?
The wet cloth between the counter and the cutting block keeps the cutting block from sliding / moving on you when force is applied, which is more comfortable and safer.
I cook every day, and I’m also a mechanical engineer, I’ve never understood where the sideways force comes from. I’ve also never had a board slide away from me. Tbh I thought this came from chefs chopping on stainless steel worktop. I’d like to understand.
When you chop, you're applying force almost entirely vertically. When you slice, you're applying at least some force horizontally. That horizontal force can be transmitted through the knife to the food to the cutting board, causing the board to slide. It's especially noticeable when you're slicing food that is high, like a loaf of bread, and the cutting board is on a slick stone countertop.
Wood board on stone surfare when the wood isn't perfectly level and it will just rotate with very little force applied.
I use silicone mat.
I think the wet cloth is meant to increase friction between the surfaces
So bad cutting boards don't slide.
It stops the board from sliding.
Stiction
So the issue with that tomato cutting test was that it was terrible form.
You obviously don't apply flat pressure on a tomato until it breaks, you slice it by sliding the blade forward as you push down. It's unclear to me that this blade offers any improvement over proper technique, and feels disingenuous to even offer that comparison.
What happens when you “oops”? All the way through the bone?
He specifically says it's not a lightsaber, and when he's cutting the tomato you can see he does have to apply force for it to go through. He compares it to an ebike, where it makes cutting easier but it's not magic.
Same as a really sharp knife. In general though, dull knives are more dangerous. You have to cut with more pressure and they're more likely to slip.
There must be a limit though. Surely a light saber is not more safe than a dull knife.
If you’re used to sharp knives then it’s probably safer than applying more pressure which could yield in surprising ways. Getting used to it is the dangerous part, especially if not forewarned or the user doesn’t heed the warning.
Lightsaber would be different because doesn’t have a blade to guide.
It's not my impression that if you make a knife very very sharp it turns in to a lightsaber.
Not really. The dangerous aspect of a knife is when it moves unexpectedly. The sharper it is, the harder it is to create a scenario where it jumps on something particularly dense, like when a saw hits a knot in a tree.
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.
Actually, a light saber is 100% safe since it doesn't exist.
Imagine how dangerous a dull lightsaber would be
You say this from any special knowledge or is it just your opinion from the video? Looks to me like it will go through your flesh and bone like they're not there, in a way even a razor sharp knife won't.
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.
Medical bone cutting knives are ultrasonic. I assume this one has a duller edge than those though.
Subsidized by Big Hook, no doubt.
It is indeed more dangerous than a regular knife.
It’s a very impressive video, but the ‘world’s first’ claim is BS: https://www.369sonic.com/ultrasonic-kitchen-knife/
“Chef knife” is the important part, the one you linked is a paring knife.
I think eventually you do need to sharpen it, this thing delays it. But it seems like a good gift if it ain't too expensive.
Use a Hauser. German steel, whereas the Japanese know to forge a blade.
Knife skills are a necessary but not sufficient condition for being a good chef.
Your cat is gonna LOVE it!
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.
I'm still in the camp that air fryers are stupid. A convection oven does literally the same thing.
Also, portable air fryers make such small servings that they're useless for people with families. What the hell I going to do with three chicken wings?
I find it funny most of these comments are about how unnecessary this thing is.
To me it has immediate appeal to make cutting easier. It's also really not that expensive. I suppose this is the same site that is crazy about AI and thought Dropbox would flop. This thing has more utility than AI to me. I suppose being a software person can warp your perception of the real world.
What does this device accomplish in the kitchen, besides being able to make fine slices of vegetables more easily? Electric carver knives beat it for slicing meat.
And then for most any other situation of knife usage it isn't necessary at all, as knives are mostly used for chopping. The one (1) thing I can see this being useful for is a shrunken down version for paring, but whether or not that is mechanically feasible, I don't know. The curve and the handle are more important than this vibro-verbing.
Nice dialogue, btw. "Help chefs feel great about themselves in the kitchen", "access to sous vide". <Kitchen Woke> ?
I have a reciprocating saw in the shed already.
when I need a ton of whatever cut thin I just use a rotary slicer.
a knife is for detail work like stripping meat. on bulk/speed/uniformity you cannot beat a slicer with a knife.
100$ ...for a charger.
I have an ultrasonic knife for reverse engineering. It's wonderful. It's also great for crafting.
I'm highly doubtful it's useful in the kitchen. Sharp knives would seem to do the trick.
Ok great, now Steve Jobs it and explain to my mom why she needs it
This looks amazing. I love tech in Lindy products that actually works well.
"Please sign in to confirm you're not a bot. This helps protect our community."
Um, no.
cue the vibro-stab themed "thats not a knife....." and hey for extra murderyness it could be paired with a shock zapper
Just kids having fun.
Don't buy dumb electronic kitchen gadgets.
Get a good steel knife, learn how to sharpen it properly, and you're set for life.
In particular, you don't need expensive stones, guides or lapping systems to do it. An aliexpress-grade 3000/8000 waterstone, a flattening stone and a strop will get most knives shaving the hairs off your arm for under £20 all-in.
The odds I will ever learn to use a waterstone or strop are nil. A Chef’s Choice manual sharpener is really easy and makes my knives plenty sharp enough to cut tomatoes.
Yeah they work fine too. The point is not that you need stones to sharpen knives at all, but you don't need insanely expensive glass or diamond stones like the YouTubers tend to tell you to get to shaving-sharp if you want to.
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!).
I'd very strongly recommend vs the waterstone. Use a ceramic or diamond one. The strop is not required but it's nice.
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.
Why? Your hands don't work?
They are really not that hard, especially if they come with the bit with the right angle.
3000/8000 is a bad one. Both are way way way too fine. I'd very much like anything similar to 300/1200 + strop or so. I can shave with that.
Also I'd not use a soaking whetsone {anymore} (my spouse resents them for being that messy).
300/1200 is too coarse for AUS10. 3000/8000 is too mild (perhaps better for finishing). I suggest 1000/3000(or 6000).
I use the 300 only if the knives are too dull or I want to change the apex to 20 degrees. Honing them back is just the 1200 and a strop. Like mentioned I can shave with that. 3000 is overkill imo, unless you are looking for the mirror finish.
Never heard it would be too fine for some steel. 300 is for creating a new edge or fixing chips or otherwise broken edge, 1000 and 3000-4000 is enough for maintaining a chefs knife. And if you can't get a knife sharp on 1000 you need to fix your technique.
I agree. My experience: I bought some basic sharpening stones and watched some youtube and have had pretty good results with my basic japenese chef knives (~$100-150) that I've had for 15 years. It's 5 minutes of work every month or two for me. This product doesn't make sense to me for the price point. The aesthetics look really poor.
The entire argument in the thread about how to best sharpen a knife is why people don't bother learning how to sharpen knives.
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!
I agree. The industry standard for a great, boring, durable and surprisingly cheap knife is the Victorinox Fibrox Chef's Knife 20 cm.
Maybe it’s dumb. But the video seems convincing. Ultrasonic knives are also used in some industrial and medical settings. So the concept does work. And the inventor of this one worked at Sansaire, Anova, and other kitchen hardware places. So they have a lot of credibility producing real products.
Of course, still need to sharpen, though.
I lost three fingers watching this video.
You'll be wanting the KnifeStop™, then.
Hehe, yeah I was wondering if something like SawStop could work. It would just need to switch off the ultrasonic, not spectacularly destroy the blade. However, I then remembered the frankfurter demo for SawStop and realised there are extra challenges for something that is actually intended for cutting meat.
For $500 I'll just replace the handle of a regular knife with a vibrator.
at least make sure to clean the vibrator first