Kiritsuke vs Gyuto

The kiritsuke is the knife people photograph. It is also, in its traditional form, a professional single-bevel tool with a steep learning curve and a handedness problem.

The traditional kiritsuke is single-bevel: ground on one face, flat or slightly hollowed on the other. It is long, usually 240 to 270mm, and in a Japanese kitchen it was conventionally carried by the head chef. It cuts beautifully when you know how, steers sideways in the cut when you do not, and it is made handed — a right-handed kiritsuke is genuinely difficult for a left-handed cook.

The kiritsuke gyuto is a normal double-bevel gyuto with the kiritsuke's angled tip grafted on. It behaves like a gyuto. It is what most Western retailers are selling when they say "kiritsuke", and it is the only one a home cook should consider.

A single-bevel blade is asymmetric, so it pushes to one side as it cuts. On a katsuramuki peel or a precise fish cut, an experienced hand uses that steering. On a home cook's onion it just means the cut drifts.

Sharpening is the bigger commitment: the bevel side is ground on the stone and the flat side needs its urasuki hollow maintained, which is a different skill from the symmetric passes a double-bevel knife wants. We cover the distinction in single bevel against double bevel.

The angled kiritsuke tip is acute and thinly supported — the same weakness as a bunka, exaggerated by length. Catching it on a board edge or a drawer will break it, and a broken tip on a 240mm knife is an expensive repair.

Buy a gyuto. The MAC MTH-80 if you want the best all-rounder, the Tojiro DP if you want the value, the Shun Classic if you want the object. The kiritsuke shape is worth owning once you know exactly how you cut and you have a specialist retailer who can tell you the maker, the steel, the hardness and — critically — whether it is single or double bevel.