I’m a big fan of using the right tool for the job in the kitchen. No surprise there, yet I frequently get that FOMO-y feeling that something new or different might be better than what I own.
Several months ago, I looked at a set of carbon steel knives made in Oregon by Steelport. They were beautiful, with their blade patina and sculptural wood handles. I wondered if I was keeping up with the Portlandians, and particularly their bread knives, when I compared it with my inexpensive but high-performing Mercer Culinary Millenia.
The Mercer is America’s Test Kitchen’s top pick for serrated bread knives, with its snub nose and pointy teeth. The black plastic handle is grippy, chunky, and functional. It immediately replaced its predecessor, a nostalgia-inducing but low-performing stainless number that I got in Paris for cheap because it had a crack in the handle.
Looking at the Steelport 10-inch Bread Knife at my favorite trade show, I daydreamed about how it might work even better than the $25 Mercer. At an astounding 450 bucks … brief pause here as the writer pulls out a calculator and divides 450 by 25 … could it be 18 times better? I will not let that idea waggle around. It was not 18 times better, but I’ll let you wonder for a moment if it was maybe a couple.
Leaving price out of it for a moment, high-end bread knives of this quality have a lot going for them. The Steelport is quite handsome, with a burl-wood handle and gray blade that stand out from the less-interesting knives in your block. At 65 on the Rockwell C scale, it is a particularly hard blade. That level of hardness can make the steel a little brittle but allows the blade to be narrow, extremely sharp, and able to hold a ripping edge for a long time. The handle is a little more “multi-planar” than most knives, and it is quite comfortable. The top of the blade, known as the spine, is rounded, something you’ll appreciate if you’re using it for a long time, as it can keep blisters from forming on your index finger; more knives should do this. There’s also a finger nook at the blade heel, which can make you feel more slotted into your grip. One difference between the two knives is that the Mercer has pointier serrations compared to the Steelport’s more rounded tips; a choppy ocean versus rolling seas, if you will.
I thought this might make a noticeable difference so I started cutting stuff up, buying and making loaves, then tearing into them with one knife then the other over the course of a couple of months. Both of them went through sandwich bread with the greatest of ease, with zero damage to the bread itself, the opposite of the manhandling you’d give the loaf if you went at it with a dull chef’s knife. I was needlessly concerned when cutting vertically into delicate croissants and even more so when I cut horizontally through the crispy, laminated goodness like you would do to toast it or to make a croissan’wich, but both blades just sliced through, leaving clean edges and neat corners in their wakes.
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