Cutco Knives

The daughter of an acquaintance came over Friday afternoon to "practice" her Cutco presentation on me. I agreed, even though my wife and I had been through one Cutco presentation before. (Actually my wife sat through that one, I didn't have the patience to sit through a sales presentation for something I didn't need). That one had cost us a few hundred dollars. This time I got out for under a hundred. Insidious, these Cutco presentations.

Cutco makes kitchen knives. Made in America by real Americans. They are very proud of them. A good size set will run you a thousand dollars. They are very good knives, but I don't know if they are worth the money.

When we got married we got a couple of sets of knives as wedding presents. They were nice enough, and we still have them. Some of them were poorly sharpened and I spent a great deal of time sharpening them by hand. After I got the initial sharpening done, it was not much effort to resharpen them, if I ever did. But that was a problem, because in spite of my good intentions, it hardly ever happened.

And they were all straight edged knives, which has it's pros and cons. The pro is that you can sharpen them yourself with a whetstone, or, if you are a barbarian, one of those wretched steels. The con is that if you use them for cutting on a ceramic surface, like a pork chop on a dinner plate, the edge quickly gets destroyed by the much harder ceramic.

A Canadian friend of mine claimed that they serve steaks on wooden planks in Canada, which makes sense. The surface of the plank will get scored, but the edges of your knife won't get destroyed. This is the same reason for using wooden cutting boards in the kitchen or butcher shop.

The edges on Cutco knives are scalloped. They have their own term for it, but scalloped is what they are. The big advantage is, for steak knives anyway, is that while the points between the scallops will impact the plate, the scalloped edges never do, and so the knives remain sharp. And that has been our experience. We have never had to have any of the Cutco knives sharpened. But they do lose their edge.

When these knives were new they were SHARP. Just grazing your finger across the tip between adjacent scallops would get you a cut. They've been knocking around our kitchen for a few years now, and the points have impacted enough plates that they have been somewhat blunted. Teresa demonstrated this for me by having me slice a piece of leather with one of my old Cutco table (steak) knives and a new one. The old one cut well enough, but the new one sliced through the leather easily.

Then there are the handles. Manufacturers of knives with wood handles don't want you to put them through the dishwasher, but I am a lazy sort, I am a man and I have a severe aversion to washing dishes, especially by hand. So they go in the dishwasher, and after awhile, the wood handles suffer for it. They start to look weathered and the rivets get loose. It's not much trouble to fix. I have tightened several rivets with punch and a hammer, and I have even applied some linseed oil to a couple of well-weathered wood handles. But it's a bit of a hassle, especially if you don't have any linseed oil.

So the current status of our knives is that the Cutco blades are in much better shape than our old wedding present knives. So there are pros and cons to buying Cutco knives. On the pro side they are very good knives, they seldom, if ever, need sharpening. They are made in America. They are sold by college students, so you are helping out people who are trying to make something of themselves. On the other hand, they are expensive.

Four different knife edges: 1) Serrated, 2) & 3) Plain (#3 is hardened) and 4) Scalloped.

Update January 2017 replaced missing picture.