Birds beak pairing knife

 

 Until you've gone to cooking school, you've likely haven't heard of a bird's beak paring knife. This knife, a vestige of the French culinary system, has a tiny curved blade fashioned like a bird's beak. It is designed, like other paring knives, for jobs that are done off the cutting board and in your hand. It was formerly employed to create ornamental cuts and garnishes that are now seldom seen outside of banquet halls, such as changing radishes into florets and tomatoes into flowers, fluting mushrooms, and "turning" vegetables into seven-sided barrels—a trademark of traditional French technique.

 

Past restaurant chefs utilize them for two sorts of jobs: peeling fruits and vegetables and fine detail work like cutting brussels sprouts or removing the eyes from potatoes. They don't believe a bird's beak paring knife will ever be able to replace a traditional paring knife these blades are just not as flexible. These aren't designed to be used on a cutting board and can't produce exact straight cuts as readily yet, such cuts are necessary for cutting lime wedges, slicing tiny blocks of cheese, scoring roasts so the fat cap may render, and creating pockets in pork chops.

 

The blades of the bird's beak paring knives were approximately an inch shorter on average than the blades of normal paring knives, so they keep closer to your hand and were, therefore, simpler to manage while making tiny incisions required to hull strawberries or remove pineapple eyes. Since the blades are crescent-shaped, they move more quickly around round or irregularly shaped items like lemons and ginger, hugging curves more closely.

 

Sharpness is arguably the most critical feature of any paring knife blade because the paring knife's small size prevents it from relying on its mass to push its way through food like a chef's knife or cleaver can. Sharpness is especially important for bird's beak paring knives since their curved blades are difficult to sharpen at home, if not impossible. Electric sharpeners cannot handle blades of this form, and even expert whetstone users may need to practice with them. Whereas the angle of a blade's cutting edge determines its perceived sharpness, the edge angles of the bird's beak paring knives we evaluated were all very comparable, ranging from 14 to 18 degrees. Instead, the sharpness of these knives was totally dictated by how sharply they were honed at their makers.

 

The tip of this knife is also important. Because you only insert the top quarter- to half-inch of the blade when coring tomatoes or hulling strawberries, a thin tip is essential for precise work. During hulling strawberries, narrow blades created precise incisions, leaving more fruit behind than blades with broader tips, which formed larger holes and swung around less deftly. And it was also critical that the blade be thin at the heel. So blades with larger heels to peel pieces of ginger felt clunky and were more likely to tear off a knob or two. With another of the smallest tips and heels, the bird's beak paring knife excelled at precise work as well as peeling.

 

The weight of the knife is crucial in terms of comfort. Whereas an ounce may not seem like much, blades weighing more than that weary and cramp your hands during repetitive chores such as cutting pineapple eyes or hulling strawberries.