Talk:Kitchen knife
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The article says that kitchen knives made from high carbon steel are 20 % carbon and 80 % iron. I strongly suspect someone dropped a digit or added a zero. Steels max out at about 4% carbon. More carbon than that and you get something like cast iron frying pan. -- Geo Swan 02:05, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
- Good eye; that does look fishy, doesn't it? I think I got it out of Alton Brown's Gear, but I don't have to book in front of me right now.
- DanielVonEhren 03:02, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
I went back to the Alton Brown book, and sure enough it says 80% iron and 20% carbon (page 68). Geo, do you have better number (I'm not sure where to look it up); I'm still agreeing that 80/20 sounds wrong.
BTW, the Chef's knife page got re-instated, so your correction (or replies) should go over there.
- This PDF document explains the phase change diagrams of iron and carbon... probably in more detail than you would prefer. Here is the 25 word version. Molten alloys are like slush. As they cool crystals precipitate out. Carbon is not very soluble in Iron. Much above 4 % Carbon and you get "cast iron" with little inclusions of pure carbon in it. The carbon content of "high Carbon steel" maxes out at 1.7%.
- I don't know where the information in the paragraphs that distinguish between carbon steel, high carbon steel, and stainless steel come from. But I believe it is pretty inaccurate. When the word "steel" is used, without being prefaced with the adjective "stainless", then it is refering to an alloy of Iron and Carbon.
- I am not a chemist. I did a project on metallurgy, in high school, a long time ago. So I don't know trust my recollection that "carbon steel" and "high carbon steel" are synonyms. But I am sure that what the article calls "high carbon steel" is some form of stainless steel. -- Geo Swan 22:32, 2005 Feb 28 (UTC)
DanielVonEhren 00:39, 28 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Contents |
[edit] Lots of changes in a short time
Man! I've been cleaning up an old directory with various articles I had started to draft; I come back a couple hours later and—Ka-pow!—a dozen edits. (Jengod, that — was especially for you. :-) )
I'd like to have a discussion on the change in name to the page. There are (as noted in the intro section) many different kinds of knifes involved in cooking. I'm not sure I think a single article can usefully handle everything from cleavers to butter knives. Many people (I'm an example) think that chef's knives are especially important; I don't know about whole books, but certainly entire chapters in books have been devoted to chef's knives. Brings out the fanatic in people. Imagine Niles Crane hyper-ventilating.
Many of the words about materials and manufacturing frankly don't apply to other knives—you wouldn't hot-forge your table knife, and bread knives are a whole different animal. I'd like to restore the Chef's knife page as a separate entity, and revise Kitchen knife to be a kind of disambiguation page. As in: "There are many kinds of kitchen knives, here are the links to each kind".
Thoughts?
DanielVonEhren 02:53, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
Works for me. I was just happy to see a Chef's knife article, but when I got in there, it had already become Kitchen knives or whatever, and I was just trying to have it make sense. Kitchen knife as disambig is fine by me! :) jengod 22:51, Feb 23, 2005 (UTC)
- And a :-) right back at 'cha. Now I just have a bunch of work to do on the article.
- DanielVonEhren 23:40, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)
[edit] I'm Planning Some Changes Here
I think this article on kitchen knives is way too small. I disagree that this should be a disambiguation page. Most kitchen knives share many properties that are worth discussing on one page. For example, why are the explainations of stamped vs forged or handle materials on the Chef's knife article and not Boning knife or Santoku? While I agree that not all topics apply to all knives, I do not think the material should be duplicated to multiple knife entries. Additionally, I do not think that most knives really lend themselves to an article that is any longer than the Boning knife article. At this length, why not just include the information here (since there is already a short description) and replace the subpages with redirects? Also, a butter knife is really a table knife; I think we should qualify that a "kitchen knife", for the sake of this article, is any knife likely to come in a block. At any rate, I am already working on changes to this article. I decided to open this up for discussion, however, after I found that this had already been pondered a year ago. You can see my progress at User:Ctdunstan/Kitchen knife (but please do not edit it yet--not to be possessive, it would just be easier to discuss changes at this point, and open it for editing when I make it public in a few days). Let me know what you all think. -- Chris 02:55, 22 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] New Page!
I have finally moved over my new version of the page. I think the article is an improvement over the previous version. It is, however, a very bold edit, so I open this up for discussion. -- Chris 03:25, 25 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] subsubsect. titles
very nice article. I suggest that the sub-subsection titles like Carving should be changed into ==== ... ==== style, since it would allow better redirection (e.g. carving knife : kitchen knife#carving).
I don't do it immediately because it might make the "floating" of the pictures less nice (adding many [ edit ] links), but I nevertheless strongly advocate for this change.
If some competent person agrees, please do make the change (maybe a guru can easily automatize(?) it). — MFH:Talk 17:21, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
- Well, I've changed over the headings to ==== style, and I now remember why I didn't do that... the TOC is quite long. I think you are right that those headings are best, so perhaps we could find a way to fix the TOC? I think the [edit] links are OK, but it would be nice to remove them from the lvl 4 headings. I tried to do this with __NOEDITSECTION__, but I didn't realize that it effects the whole page. Any thoughts? -- Chris 23:10, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
- Ok, so I floated the TOC on the right since it is so long and narrow... but that created some problems with the images that were using {{clear}}, so I switched the "materials" and "types" sections. Overall, I think it looks pretty good. It would be nice to get rid of some of those [edit] links, though. Thanks for the work on Category:Images of kitchen knives, by the way... it looks good. -- Chris 11:04, 23 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Other knives
Since this article starts, A kitchen knife is any knife that is used in a kitchen, it would seem to include table (or butter) knives. As such, the following topics should be included:
- Silver as material
- Butter knife and case knife
However, I don't want to just annoy people. Would others support such a change? -Harmil 06:05, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
- I see what you mean, but I think that a butter knife is more like a table knife. I guess a steak knife is too, but they at least come in cutlery blocks. Either way I think the first paragraph should be rewritten (I was never very happy with it), but we could still include a butter knife somewhere if that is what's best. I think including silver as a material might confuse people a bit though, as it doesn't really make a good knife (just silverware). Certainly we would say in the butter knife description what they are made out of, but I fear if we add silver in the materials section we would have to add a whole host of bizzare composite materials used for cheap flatware, none of which make a good blade. Do you know what I mean? What do people think about this? -- Chris 19:03, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Steak knife
The joke about steak knives is that they have points, in case the cow isn't dead yet. Or maybe for if you don't have a fork. I suppose the aggressive look makes them look sharper, but I cannot imagine the point ever being used. David R. Ingham 20:49, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Images
I don't believe that we have a strong claim to use the images from the Wusthof website, so I have listed them at Wikipedia:Fair use review. Comments are welcome there. FreplySpang (talk) 05:30, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
- I have sent them an email, advising them to release their images under a creative commons license. After all, this is free product placement. I'll update you if they respond. 84.81.35.156, 13:15 19 May 2006 (UTC)
