What Is a Nakiri Knife Used For?

A nakiri is used for vegetables, and specifically for cutting a lot of them straight down to the board. It is a tall rectangular blade — 45 mm at the heel on a Tojiro DP — with a dead-flat edge and no tip at all. That geometry means the full length of the edge reaches the board at the same moment, so a cabbage comes off in separate slices rather than a hinged accordion, and your knuckles never touch the wood.

The word translates roughly as "leaf cutter", which is a fair description of its origin and an understatement of its range. Anything you would chop, slice or julienne from the vegetable drawer is in scope: onions, cabbage, carrots, daikon, peppers, chard, herbs, squash once it is halved. What is out of scope is everything that needs a point.

• Volume chopping. A head of cabbage, a kilo of onions, a tray of mirepoix. Full board contact on every cut means no half-attached slices to go back and separate.
• Fine julienne and thin slicing. A 1.8 mm spine on the Tojiro falls through a carrot rather than cracking it, and the flat edge keeps the cuts even from the heel to the front corner.
• Pushing cut food off the board. The square front corner and tall flat face make the blade a usable scoop — a small thing you use constantly.
• Working with large hands or a thick board. Height is knuckle clearance, and 45 mm is more than most gyutos offer. See best knives for big hands.

1. Push, do not rock. The edge is flat, so a rocking stroke lifts most of it off the board and makes the knife feel clumsy. Push the blade forward and down in one motion, lift, reposition, repeat. Cooks coming from a German chef's knife find this the only real adjustment.
2. Let the height do the work. Hold a pinch grip near the heel and keep the knuckles of your guiding hand against the flat face. The blade is tall enough that your guide hand has somewhere to sit through the whole cut.
3. Keep it off bone and frozen food. 1.8 mm behind a thin bevel will chip. A nakiri is for produce; the board rule matters too — a hard plastic or glass board will micro-chip a thin Japanese edge, which is why we recommend rubber or wood-core boards.
4. Sharpen it like any double bevel. 15 degrees per side on a 1000-grit stone. The flat edge actually makes it one of the easiest shapes to sharpen — there is no curve to follow. Our sharpening walkthrough applies unchanged.

That table is the whole case for the nakiri as a second knife rather than a first one. A gyuto does every row acceptably; a nakiri does one row superbly and two rows not at all. Buy the all-rounder first — your first Japanese knife makes that argument properly — and add the specialist when vegetable prep is the part of cooking you do most.

• First nakiri. Tojiro DP Nakiri 165mm (F-502). VG-10 at 59-61 HRC, 45 mm of heel height, a 1.8 mm spine, and a genuinely flat edge — the specification that makes the shape worth owning, at a price that lets you find out.
• Upgrade. Shun Classic 6.5 inch Nakiri (DM0728). Flat-ground VG-MAX at 16 degrees per side, and a handle usable left or right handed. Buy the Tojiro, decide you use it, then buy this.
• You want most of the benefit and a tip. MAC Professional 6.5 inch Santoku (MSK-65). Extremely thin behind the edge at 15 degrees per side, with a point for the jobs a nakiri refuses.

A nakiri is for vegetables in volume, and within that job nothing in a home kitchen beats it. It is not a chef knife, it will never be a chef knife, and the cooks who are disappointed by one bought it expecting versatility. Buy the Tojiro DP if you want to know whether the shape suits you; read our nakiri roundup if you have already decided, and nakiri versus bunka if you are weighing up adding a point.