I may be 40 next year (gah!), with two pretty much grown up children, (double gah!), but there are a few things that I still don’t quite seem to have got to grips with when it comes to adulting.
My knife collection is one of these things. (As in kitchen knives, nothing suspect.)
For about the last twenty years I have had one Good Knife. It was in a box full of random kitchen junk that I bought at an auction for about two pounds. It’s a large serrated knife with a wooden handle and it has seen me through some tough times. It works as my bread knife, my… er… actually I’m not sure of any of the other knife names to be honest.
Suffice to say that for a long time that knife has met all of my chopping needs.
And then there comes a day, (around the time that you start the process of buying your first home and decide you want more for yourself), when you realise that that one knife is HOLDING YOU BACK. That knife is why you still feel like you’re waiting to decide what you want to be when you grow up. That knife is why you don’t have enough in your pension fund, or a car with working windows. Damn it. If only you had decent knives, you’d be a real grown up and accomplish real grown up things.
Well.
Check me out NOW with my Robert Welch Signature Compact Knife Block.
Now I’ve got no excuse have I?
I think knives are once of those things that you don’t realise are missing from your life until you have proper good ones. You just get by, crucifying chicken breasts as best you can and avoiding buying swedes or watermelon because you know that cutting them up will be just TOO MUCH.
Not any more!
The Robert Welch Signature Compact Knife Block consists of an oak block, a pair of scissors, and four knives – a 22cm bread knife, a 16cm cooks knife, a 14cm kitchen knife and a 10cm vegetable knife.
And they are sharp.
You forget that knives are meant to be sharp until you do things like chop the tops of strawberries towards your thumb and slice into your own flesh. (Oops.)
I basically just had to wave the cooks knife vaguely in the direction of the watermelon and it sort of magically fell into beautiful, neat slices. It’s an absolute dream.
The feel good in your hand too. They are properly weighty – reassuringly solid and expensive, like you could use them in a circus act and they’d fly through the air with precision and grace.
(Don’t use them in a circus act.)
Belle does quite a bit of the cooking at the moment, and she LOVES them.
‘It’s like chopping warm butter,’ she said when she first tried them, ‘and when I chop up tomatoes I don’t have to stab them first to break the skin – they just slice first time!’
I’ve really noticed the difference with onions. Our old, blunt knives would just slide around on the surface of the skin, but the Robert Welch ones just get right in there. Having decent sharp knives actually means your less likely to cut yourself, because you don’t have to exert as much pressure or try to hack your way through things all the time.
I wouldn’t say I often chop up so many things that I wear myself out, but if that was a concern then you don’t need to worry with these – the Robert Welch knife handles are made from tactile DuPont™ and ‘ergonomically shaped for comfort, balance and to minimise fatigue’.
And they have these cute little initials on them too, making them the ideal present for any friends who happen to be called things like Rebecca Wallis or Robin Walker.
The Robert Welch Signature Compact Knife Block will set you back a little bit more than the £2 I spent on my old wooden handled knife, but for the quality I think they’re actually very reasonable – £188 at the moment on the Robert Welch website, and for the oak block, four knives and scissors I think that’s jolly decent.
I really cannot stress enough the difference these knives will make to your life if you’ve only ever owned crappy old blunt ones.
They’re so good, I’m thinking about putting them in charge of my pension.
We were sent this knife set for the purposes of this review but all opinions are my own, especially the comment about the circus.