THE SLICER aka BREAD KNIFE

In this day and age when so many people are no longer eating bread (cutting out the carbs), why would you need a Slicer or Bread Knife? Because it can do so much more than cut bread. The Slicer was originally built to cut through large loaves of bread, so it needed to be long and have a serrated edge to cut through the thickest crust. Today, it can also be used to cut through pumpkins and watermelon or any other large fruit, vegetable or even meat. It also has a serrated edge to better cut through most crusts easily without crushing the bread and leave little mess.

What it is NOT meant to do is to cut through bones, which is why you need a butcher knife. While a chef’s knife is great for dicing fruits and vegetable, it is not long enough to cut through most breads. It also may not replace a carving knife because it is not meant to cut around bones on a turkey or chicken. Rather, it was meant to slice straight through something like bread and watermelon.

As you can see, the slicer has a special use, just like every knife does, and is a great help with those fruits and vegetables that are too big for other knives. Most people have told me that you cannot cut bread fresh out of the oven because it will crush the bread, leaving it smaller than what was intended. That is due in part to serrated edges. Recessed edges, however, are able to cut through bread without any crushing and leave even less crumbs to clean up.

For more information, I would love to talk to you about your knives. Next week, I will be talking about the Cheese Knife.