Martha Stewart Everyday Full Tang 8 inch Chef's knife

Specifications

This knife is very similar in design to the Henckels international line. The blade stock is very thin, only 0.07" thick at the spine, with a full flat grind, the combination makes the knife very light, only ~60 g. The edge is also very thin and acute. The blade is only 0.008" thick behind the edge which is ground at ~14 degrees per side.

Stock testing

The NIB sharpness is fairly low. The blade can slice photocopy paper well, but has no ability to push cut. On light thread it scores 267 +/- 33 g, and on 1/4" poly it takes 2.5 +/- 0.8 cm to cut the cord. The OK-45 ceramic blade from Kyocera took ~ 135 g and 0.75 cm on the same tests and is about twice as sharp in regards to smooth push cutting, and about three times as aggressive on a slice. However because of the extreme nature of the edge geometry the Martha Stewart knife still had impressive performance on 3/8" hemp taking 28 - 32 lbs on a rocking push cut and 23-25 lbs on a two inch draw cut.

Kitchen use

On some vegetables it was not as smooth as the Japanese utility knife I commented on awhile back, but it required less force than the Henckels international Chef's knife which I had reground to improve its cutting performance. However it did tend to stick a little on the thick vegetables due to its thin profile, not enough to give the Henckels the advantage overall. On tasks that required a high sharpness it fell significantly short. The edge slipped a lot trying to trim the fat from meats and had no ability to cut soft fruits like plums or tomatoes.

Under magnification the edge could be seen to have been shaped with a rough belt which had not been refined but just buffed, which induced a loss of aggression and overall sharpness due to roll and/or carbide rounding. The edge was easily fixed with just a few passes on a butchers steel and the knife would then slice the plums and trim the fat with no slippage.

The blade was then used for some moderate heavy work, disjointing some chicken legs by simply press cutting right through the bones, not cutting through the joints. This did not damage the edge in any visible way, which is decently impressive. It could do this on both cooked and fresh bones.

Sharpening

This knife responds well to a butcher steel, and I had no problem honing it to a fine razor finish on a fine ceramic rod. The only reservation I will make is that because it is rather soft, if you are sharpening on rods, a light touch is needed on the few honing strokes to prevent excessive burr formation.

Misc commentary

The handle is very similar to the Henckels International line and will become slick easily if you hand gets exposed to fats or similar, it is decently rounded though so it is comfortable enough. Corrosion resistance is high, it shows no signs of patina after many exposures to even acidic fruits.

Regarding the steel, this is described as "high carbon stainless", which probably is some grade of AISI 420 stainless. For a regular utility knife this isn't a great choice as the edge will roll quickly on hard materials. This is why AISI 420 has a low reputation for poor edge holding. You can go quite a bit beyond AISI 420 and still have the same problem, for example the SAK blades go blunt quite fast in the same manner, the main problem with these steels is that the RC is low.

Most kitchen use though is on soft materials so the steel doesn't need to be as hard to stay sharp for quite awhile. Geometry is also very critical in this respect. would rather use a knife made out of soft steel in a fine geometry in the kitchen that a very hard steel in a blade that was too thick. For example I ran some edge testing on 3/8" hemp with the Martha Stewart blade and a SOG SEAL 2000 (both blades had micro bevels of 22 degrees produced by a 600 grit DMT rod) :

The SOG should be of higher quality steel than the Martha Stewart blade and you would assume has a more careful heat treating process, however even after the Martha Stewart blade has made 254 cuts it is able to cut through the rope *far* easier than the SOG blade can when it is freshly sharpened. The lifetime of the cutting ability of the kitchen knife is far in excess of the SOG simply due to the geometry of the edge. This can be extended to cutting soft materials in general which shows you that you don't need much at all from a steel to be able to cut this type of material for a very long time as long as the geometry is so optimized and since the demands of the material are very low, almost any material can be used and crafted to an optimal geometry.

Overview

In short the knife has a low NIB sharpness, but high overall cutting ability once sharpened. It is a very light knife, if you like some heft in your chef's knife this is really not the one for you. Also I inspected several at the store and while this one had nice clean edge lines, many of them didn't. Some showed large variances in edge width and even the edge curvature looked a little off on some. This one was the best I have seen and even it had a slight recurve to the edge near the handle.

Just a quick note, the cutting ability rating is for after it has been properly sharpened. With the blade as bought, the cutting ability is below average as it can't cut many of the softer foods well.

Comments and references

Comments can be sent by email : cliffstamp[REMOVE]@cutleryscience.com or by posted to the following thread on Bladeforums :

• Martha Stewart Chef's knife