The bloke behind the blade

Hey, I’m Michael

I test kitchen knives for a living now, which is a sentence my careers advisor never saw coming. No test kitchen, no sponsor deals, no lab coat — just me, a stack of cutting boards, and an unreasonable number of onions.

My dad talked me out of culinary school. Best and worst advice I ever got. He said I’d end up hating food if I did it for a living, so I got a sensible job instead and quietly went feral about cooking at home. The knives were the gateway drug. First a cheap one that changed how I cooked, then a slightly better one, then a drawer full, then a second drawer, then a wall rack because the drawers were full.

Somewhere along the way I started keeping notes — how each one held its edge, how it felt after two hours of prep, whether the handle turned to a slip hazard the second it got wet. Those notes became this site.

How many knives does one person need? One more. Always.

Because most knife content on the internet is written by people who have never used the knife. You know the type — a big-name outlet publishes “The 10 Best Chef’s Knives” and it’s clearly a spreadsheet of Amazon bestsellers with the affiliate links swapped in. When Forbes is reviewing chef’s knives between articles about crypto and private jets, something has gone wrong.

Most knife content on the internet is garbage. There, I said it.

I’m not a pro chef. I’m not a metallurgist. I can’t tell you the exact carbide structure of a blade and I won’t pretend to. What I can do is actually cook with a knife for weeks, notice what annoys me, and tell you plainly whether it’s worth your money. That’s the whole pitch. No gatekeeping, no jargon flexing, no pretending a $300 knife makes you a better cook than a sharp $50 one.

I buy every knife I review with my own money. No freebies, no loaners, no “gifted for review” arrangements that somehow always end in five stars. If a knife is on this site, I paid for it and I used it — same board, same onions, weeks of real cooking.

Yes, there are affiliate links. If you buy through one, I get a small cut at no extra cost to you, and that’s what keeps the lights on. But here’s the part that matters:

Sometimes the thing I recommend pays me next to nothing. Sometimes the “best value” pick is a knife with barely any margin in it. I don’t care. The rankings are the rankings, and if I ever let that slip, the whole site is worthless anyway.