# Chef's I need your honest opinion about CUTCO.



## sportsfan007

jhih


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## minas6907

You sure you can take the onslaught?

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## sportsfan007

Please just give me your honest opinion. It's not like your personally talking about me. I just want to know.


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## foodpump

I appreciate your honesty and willingness to solicit opinions, thank you.

Quite frankly, the Cutco knives are overpriced and only perform so-so.

Look, a restaurant has basically two options when it comes to knives for cooks:

1)The first is every man/woman for themselves, and as long as the knife is sharp and clean, there is no problem.  Obviously the cooks take great pride in their equipment and will buy good quality stuff.

2) The second option is rentals.  This is quite common with chain restaurants  and larger kitchens.  The employer contracts a company that supplies "X" amount of chef knives, bread knives, boning knives, paring knives, etc. Once every 6-12 weeks--as per contract, the knives are exchanged for fresh ones.  These knives are inexpensive and butt-ugly, however I must stress n that they do perform quite well, and of course, they are free to use for the employee. I stress again that these knives do perform well.

Hopefully this will provide you with a bit of insight into the commercial kitchens.

My "issues" so to speak with Cutco are as follows:

1) Price.  I find them waaay overpriced.  A 10" chef's knife of this quality should not cost more than $55.00 retail.  And there is good competition at this price range, both Victorinox (aka Forschner) and Mac sell at this range, and they sell very well and are respected for what they are: Inexpensive quality workhorses.

2) Handles.  I find them awkward and uncomfortable to grip.  When wet or greasy, almost impossible to grip properly.

3) Grinding.  The Cutco blades are typically hollow ground, and very roughly ground at that.  What this means is that the blade does not taper down in from thick to thin gradually, (from the spine to the edge) rather the blade is consistently thick right up to the hollow grind where it tapers down dramatically.  I find this a very cheap way of thinning down the blade and also find that the blade acts like a wedge, since it tapers so dramatically, compared to almost every other commercially available  knife that tapers from the spine to the edge gradually and slices cleanly without splitting or wedging actions.

In all honesty, the two most used knives in the kitchen are the 9 or 10" Chefs, and the paring knife.  Both of these are preferred simple, not Kullenschlifs or scallops or whatever and not serrated edges either.  A bread knife is a distant 3rd, and maybe boning knives after that.  In my opinion, the paring knives should be dirt cheap, like under $5.00 because they get lost so quickly and abused so easily. 

Hope this helps


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## chefross

I was a Cutco Cutlery rep in another life and I fell out of it simply because I did not care for them myself.

I tried to get used to them but like was previously mentioned I didn't care for the handle either.

How could I sell something to someone else that I didn't like or care about?

I still have 5 of the knives and a cleaver in my Chef's bag....and there they sit.


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## cheftimothyj

I considered becoming a Cutco rep years ago.  My thought was to approach restaurants/chefs also.  Then my sales manager informed me that the warranty on the knives would not be honored if they were used in a commercial application.  Something you might want to check on before you go pitching them to anyone.  This was 20+ years ago so it may have changed.


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## tweakz

.


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## beastmasterflex

Only person I ever met in a pro kitchen that used cutco knives was mentally handicapped.


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## michaelga

Here is another point of view.

I've heard about them almost all my career... that is a long long long long time, covering many continents and many cuisines.

I have never seen one in a kitchen, any kitchen at all ever.  I have seen sharpened hack-saw blades with wood handles, wood paddles with finishing nails driven through them to tenderize food and many other horrors of horrors but ....

Never a CutCo -

I might actually go out and buy one just so I can see for myself.!


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## sandsquid

My wife and I teach archery at a faith based youth summer camp, and naturally I tend to hang out in the kitchen helping the staff prepare meals.  One of the counselors was a Cutco Rep. (to make extra college money) and started his sales pitch on me, so I said "Bring your knives and meet me in the kitchen and help prep for a meal."

So dinner (for 240 kids + 70 staff) he worked with my knives (a 20 year old Wustoff 8", a Mercer granton edge roast knife, and a 20 year old Mundial bread knife) and I used his Cutcos.  I hit my knives with a steel first, he claimed his knives were "factory freshly sharpened."

At the end of the meal he said he going to stop selling Cutco because he could not sell a product he didn't believe in anymore.


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## sandsquid

tweakz said:


> Bose speakers


Those are fighting words!

I am the fourth owner of a set of Bose 901 speakers (I traded someone a badly used 1976 Chevy Vega) and have been lugging around since 1986. Until you've listened to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin IV, or any Miles Davis, on a original pressed vinyl preferably on a Bang & Olufsen turntable, through Bose 901's, you have not truly _heard_ it.


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## cheflayne

SandSquid said:


> Those are fighting words!
> 
> I am the fourth owner of a set of Bose 901 speakers (I traded someone a badly used 1976 Chevy Vega) and have been lugging around since 1986. Until you've listened to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Led Zeppelin IV, or any Miles Davis, on a original pressed vinyl preferably on a Bang & Olufsen turntable, through Bose 901's, you have not truly _heard_ it.


Naw. Thorens turntable, Klipsch studio monitors and McIntosh tube amp, now you are talking!


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## chef torrie

In their respective catergories, Bose is still a very good product. Maybe overpriced but still good sound and quality. CUTCO is not.


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## tweakz

.


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## dcarch

It is interesting that sound system talk comes up in this Cutco thread. Actually there are similarities between buying a knife and buying a sound system.

Personally I will never buy or use a Cutco knife, however, apparently Cutco is doing not too badly, so they must be serving some needs out there, and I have no problem with that. If someone spends a lot of hard earned cash and is happy with the purchase, I will not go and tell him/her that he/she is a moron. If someone is totally unhappy after buying Cutco, well sorry, there is Google for doing research.

Buying a sound system, likewise, many of us have misunderstandings of the science of human hearing and acoustics, as well as falling victim to clever advertisements.

What is the sense of spending $50,000 for a “flat frequency” amplifier when human ears can’t tell the difference of sound level of one or two dbs? Certainly the weakest link are the loudspeakers, which can have +- 10 dbs of peaks and valleys, regardless of what the specs say. Then human ears can’t tell harmonic distortions very well. Not only that, many people tend to like distortions, that’s why you have bass and treble controls. Distortions can be like MSG in cooking, it can be nice for many people.

So you spend $50,000 for a “wonderful” Morantz or  McIntosh system, but the moment you bring the system home, your room acoustic will immediately introduce distortions of as much as +- 20 dbs of peaks and valleys to your so called “Flat frequency”. The octave graphics equalizer is not very good in flatten your room acoustics, unless you go thru 1/3 octave narrow band equalization using active electronic filters.

So your are convinced that your system sounds better than anyone else’s who spent much less than you did. Nothing wrong about that, it is you system in your living room.

There are people who will sincerely swear that Cutco knives are the best. It’s OK with me.

Those are just my personal views, I accept the fact that yours can be just as valid.

dcarch


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## colin

The Cutco-Bose similarity is in sales.  Both are sold in a way that discourages direct comparison to competing products.

One reason Cutco does in-home selling is to force comparison between new Cutco knives and whatever knives people have on hand.  Most people don't understand sharpening and have blunt knives, so the Cutco product will look good.

Bose products are commonly sold in Bose-only stores or in special rooms of bigger stores.  This makes it hard to do a direct comparison between their speakers and competing speakers.  A good hifi store will have a listening room set up to make it easy to do these comparisons.

Cutco makes functional knives and Bose makes functional speakers.  But both are substantially overcharging you for the quality of product you're getting.


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## foodpump

Well, yes what you say is true, but the O.P was soliciting opinions from Chefs, for the purpose of going into professional kitchens to sell his products.

So the common complaints among professional cooks is that the handles are uncomfortable (and just plain weird, to boot) and that the knives themselves are waay overpriced.

I'll be first to admit I don't own any Cutco stuff, but I demo my products (food products that is) at about 3 trade shows per year, and at every trade show there is always a Cutco booth.  So I try the knives out during the slow periods.  Many times the booths don't have a cutting board or a carrot to fool around with, but I usually have one at my booth, so I bring it over and try them out.


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## ed buchanan

Pretty and nice for the housewife..  For commercial heavy duty use, forget it, Way overpriced for what you get.


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## minas6907

Agreed with everything above. I cant stand the handles, they feel weird when wet, I feel like its going to slip right out of my hand. Also, on the chefs knifed, my fingers hit the cutting board when making cuts. And when the price of a cutco chefs knife is in the $150 range, there's too many other knives to consider that will preform much better. Something that always ticked me off is when a sales man tells me that the cutco blades are not serrated. Im by no means a knife expert, but those do look like little serrations to me. Additionally, when you use cutco knives in a commercial kitchen, you automatically become the butt of every joke. 

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## theperegrine

I think you've by and large got the consensus that they're not great. A knife rental/sharpening service would probably be better for any commercial application where cooks don't bring their own equipment.

Furthermore, I'm of the firm opinion that knives should NEVER be bought in sets. A knife is like a glove, and cooks are going to spend thousands of hours working with these tools. Each knife and task is different and should be selected differently as there is no "one size fits all" solution. Anyone trying to push a knife set on you is actually trying to sell you 2-3 knives you will never ever use.


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## alaminute

Very informative thread!; about speakers I mean, I already knew Cutco sucks for commercial use. I did inherit some Cutco steak knives from a neighbor and they work great at home  but yeah, I would rather bring in a Paula deen knife from Walmart than be seen with a Cutco at work


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## harrisonh

crummy 440A steel
Most knives you'd find at wallmart are made of 440A

these knives are for home cooks with a lot of money and no experience cooking
yes, if you bring in a cutco to work, you'll never be able to live it down.

 

If someone in the thread is thinking of selling cutco to a trained chef, they'd never even get an appointment. If you called, they would think it's a buddy of theirs pulling a prank. They'd also ask if you're selling bacon stretchers or left handed smoke shifters.
 Even the practice knives we used in school are a thousand times better with better handles and MUCH better steel. The "kitchen" knives that have been abused by every commis and prep cook would still be better than a new cutco, even if they had been run through the washer 50 times. Again those cheap forschners, mundials, dexters, etc., all have better steel and better ergonomics, and they're about one sixth the cost of a cutco.

You wanna sell to a home cook, I'm sure you could make a decent living, considering the markup. Wanna sell to a chef? You'd have a better chance running across a freeway during rush hour.


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