What size steel for a chef's knife?

Kitchen knives are thin. An 8 in gyuto or French chef's knife wants a spine of 0.090–0.100 in at the heel — 3/32 in stock is the standard, 1/8 in is the absolute maximum and only with a strong distal taper — tapering to well under 1/16 in at the tip. Most makers do these by stock removal from flat stock so the blade starts flat and thin.

Width is the issue, not thickness: a 1 7/8 in heel needs 2 in stock, which is sold as flat bar in carbon steels and as sheet in stainless. Buying a 2 × 3/32 × 36 in bar and cutting two blades from it is the cheapest way in.

What a chef's knife is for

This is the knife that does eight or nine tenths of the work on a board: dicing onions, slicing, mincing aromatics, portioning boneless meat, breaking down produce. It is not for bone. A thin kitchen blade taken to a chicken carcass or a frozen block chips, and the chef's knife is not a substitute for a cleaver however often you read that it is.

The French and German profiles are the same idea solved two ways. German knives carry a deep continuous belly from about mid-blade forward, built for a rocking chop with the tip anchored on the board. French knives are flatter back from the heel and rise to a finer point, which suits push-cutting and drawing the knife through. Neither is correct; they match different hands. The Japanese gyuto — literally "beef sword" — is a Meiji-era adaptation of the French pattern, made after the government lifted the ban on eating meat in 1871–72 and Western cooking arrived; it is a Japanese reading of a European knife, usually harder and thinner than either Western original.

What buyers actually want from a handmade one is geometry a factory will not risk: thin behind the edge, real distal taper, and a heel around 2 in so their knuckles clear the board. Larrin Thomas's testing is blunt about the priority — a thin, acute edge matters more than the steel or the heat treatment, and a soft steel ground thin will outcut a super steel ground thick. The other thing to get right is food release: a flat polished face suctions to potato slices, which is why convexity, an S-grind or a hammered finish is worth the extra work on a tall blade.

Stock for a chef's knife

Forging a chef's knife from thicker bar — 1 1/4 × 1/4 in is popular — is a real skill: you draw the width out rather than the length. The calculator's forged mode assumes you start at roughly the finished width; if you forge width from narrow bar, work from volume and expect a lot of hammering.

Widths assume blade height + 1/8 in rounded up to stock; thickness is the finished spine rounded up. Change the inputs above for your own pattern.

Steels that suit it

Questions