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When the Tojiro ITK 270 mm bread knife arrived, it was immediately the ugliest knife in the house. By far. And the least ergonomic knife. Its unattractive, bulky, squarish, black pakkawood handle was too big, even for my large hands.

So the first thing I did, after slicing a couple of breads with it, was to have the knife rehandled. Frederiek de Vette made a beautiful handle out of spalted maple burl for me. Even though I have quite a few knives with custom handles by now, this one is special. Whenever I look at it, I need to touch it. The curves just feel so good in the hand.

I got the knife to cut bread. Sandwich bread, flatbread, rye bread, cornbread, sourdough bread, focaccia, ciabatta, pita, yufka, baguettes, bagels, buns, cakes, rolls, crumpets, by now the knife has cut them all. And it has done so very well.

The nice thing about this knife is that it actually cuts. It doesn’t rip bread apart and it produces relative little crumbs.

<h4>How to select a bread knife</h4>

My criteria for a bread knife are quite different from those for other knives. I want a gyuto to be made of a hard steel that is easy to sharpen and to have a nice geometry and a profile with a long flat spot. But most of these things don’t interest me when considering a bread knife. To me the single most important thing in a bread knife is… the shape of its serrations. For most types of bread you don’t even need a bread knife. A sharp gyuto works well on them. And it hardly produces any crumbs. Only for breads with hard crusts or crusts with hard pieces in them, a serrated knife is an advantage. Such a knife concentrates its pressure on the tips of the serrations. Thus the cutting surface is reduced and the force on the bread is larger. Moreover, once the tips of the serrations have penetrated the crust of the bread, the serrations aid in cutting the long fibers of the bread. Not all serrations are equal. My Tojiro knife has what one might call rounded serrations. But serrations can have many other shapes.

Picture courtesy of Knives and Tools

The rounded serrations of my Tojiro (very similar to those of the Wüsthoff Gourmet) are a bit less aggressive than the saw tooth serrations of, e.g., a Wüsthoff Xline bread knife. So I need a bit more pressure to cut the crust of hard breads. The advantage is that my knife produces much less bread crumbs. This is a general trade-off: more aggressive teeth cut hard crusts easier, but they result in more crumbs. If you hate bread crumbs, by the way, there even exist special cutting boards for bread. (No, I don’t own one.) Another consideration when getting a bread knife is its profile, particularly the rounding. My Tojiro knife is slightly rounded, which makes slicing a bit easier to me. A knife with a similar profile is the MAC Superior bread knife. But there are plenty of bread knives that have an entirely straight edge, should you prefer this. Examples are most Wüsthoff and Kai Shun bread knives and the Güde bread knife.

The final consideration for a bread knife is its length. I prefer a long knife, since it allows me to slice long breads lengthwise. And I’ve got a short sandwich knife, also known as a tomato knife or a sausage knife in my local cook shop, to cut soft buns. I hardly use this sandwich knife, by the way, since I use a gyuto or a petty to slice buns. (I’ve also got a steak knife which I don’t use for steaks–what crook has devised that a steak knife should be serrated? But the steak knife works great on pizza, which is also a kind of bread.)

<h4>Conclusion</h4>

The Tojiro ITK is a long bread knife with rounded serrations. It works well on hard crusts, though one needs slightly more force than with a knife that has saw tooth serrations. But it produces far less crumbs. I don’t know what steel the Tojiro is made of and I honestly don’t care.

<h4>Factsheet</h4>

Click on the factsheet for a larger version.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 3 months ago by Mark76.
• This reply was modified 9 years, 3 months ago by Mark76.