A good set of kitchen knives is crucial to help prepare your meals without added stress. After lots of slicing and dicing, we’ve learned a thing or two about how to buy the best for your food prep.
The knives we've put to the test including chef's knives, bread knives, utility knives. Need a reliable electric carving knife to carve your Sunday roast or Chrismas turkey without any faff? Our experts have reviewed them, too. We've also found the knife sharpeners that will keep your knives slicing well.
While it can be tempting to buy a matching set from just one manufacturer, our tests have discovered Best Buy recommendations across a variety of brands.
If you don't fancy shopping around and want everything in one package, we've also tested kitchen knife sets.
New kitchen knives can be a big investment, but our tests reveal that you can get Great Value kitchen knives for less than £20. Here's what else you need to know before you buy.
A kitchen knife set gives you all the tools to tackle your food prep, from carving a joint of beef to peeling potatoes.
The knife sets we tested started from £25 and went up to £600. Our Best Buys are more than £100, so it's worth paying a bit more for the quality.
However, we also discovered a decent knife set for less than £100, which got our Great Value recommendation.
See our pick of the best knife sets to find out which impressed for less.
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Discover the best saucepan sets for cooking and durability
If you only buy one knife, make it a chef's knife. These versatile blades can be used for most food prep tasks, from slicing fruits and vegetables to dicing or carving meat and poultry.
If you're wondering whether expensive knives stay sharp for longer? The good news is that you don't need to spend big. We found one Great Value knife that cost less than £25.
See our reviews of the best chef's knives and the three Best Buys.
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Considering a bread knife's job is simply to cut neatly through the crust, we were surprised by how costly some can be. Even though our tests proved it does pay to shell out more for the best, you can find some for a lot less that still do a more than decent job.
The best bread knives we found sliced cleanly through all different types of bread in straight slices. The worst squished the bread and left us with a mess of crumbs.
Find out find which of the best bread knives were Best Buys.
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A kitchen utility knife is designed for cutting food that's too fiddly or small for a chef's knife. It has a narrow blade that tapers to a small tip, which makes it perfect for thinly slicing fruit or trimming and filleting meat and fish with ease.
We found two Best Buys, each costing less than £30.
Discover our best kitchen utility knives to see which were the sharpest.
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A good electric carving knife makes for smooth, even and easy-to-cut slices of meat and bread.
Those we tested cost between £14 and £33, and found that the best pick was among the more expensive we tested.
Read our reviews of the best electric carving knives for slicing your Sunday roast centrepiece.
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No knife stays sharp forever, which is why if you want yours to last, you'll also need to invest in a sharpener or a whetstone.
A handheld knife sharpener is the easiest and safest sharpening option. We test manual and electric optioins. Generally speaking, manual sharpeners are simpler to use but require more effort, whereas electric sharpeners are more powerful but take some practice to ensure you don't wear you knife blade down.
You can also use a whetstone to sharpen your knives, but they can be difficult to master and, if used incorrectly, can end up damaging the cutting edge of your blade.
When testing sharpeners, we found two that stood out enough to get our recommendations, both of which cost less than £35.
See the best knife sharpeners and how to use them.
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