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GLOBAL 4-pc Knife Set by Chef Ludo Lefebvre
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GLOBAL 4-pc Knife Set by Chef Ludo Lefebvre
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Product Description
A collaboration between GLOBAL knives and renowned chef and culinary authority Ludo Lefebvre, this set features the four knives he deems “essential for every home and professional kitchen.” Made from GLOBAL’s Cromova 18 steel—a blend of chromium, molybdenum, and vanadium that’s ice tempered and hardened—each knife will hold a wicked edge over time. The handles are designed hollow, then filled with sand to achieve perfect balance Read More
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keyboard_arrow_downreswright
3850
Jul 13, 2019
For a budget set, this isn't bad, or at least, doesn't look bad from the photos. None of these knives will perform as well as a top of the line kitchen knife, but those cost this much per knife, not per set. They look like one piece but are welded together and the handles are filled with sand to give the blade a useful working weight.
Cromova 18 isn't some cutting edge proprietary steel but it turns out that that's a good thing in this case. According to zknives, Cromova 18 tests on the spectrometer as equivalent to 9Cr18MoV -- what Western manufacturers call 440B. I obviously wasn't in the boardroom when Cromova 18 was named but it's hard to see why it isn't justa fusion of Chromium, Molybdenum and Vanadium (which are the Cr, Mo and V respectively in that alloy formula) with the 18 added on to distinguish it from lower grades of 9Cr stainless.
If you're going 'oh, rats' - don't. 440B is a high carbon steel that is very easy to touch up with a honing steel or a simple draw sharpener, which means that it's practical in the kitchen in ways that a lot of cool pocketknife steels just aren't, because they're too hard to sharpen and too brittle to work around food all day. 440B knives can take the sort of abuse that most people dish out in the kitchen, and they'll not only stay in one piece, they won't leave metal chips in food.
That's counterintuitive to a lot of folks who go 'wait, 440B steel is old as balls, how's it possibly a better steel than something like a top end Bohler, Crucible, or Carpenter steel like the kind we see on sale in expensive pocket knives'?. The answer is rooted in engineering and materials science. The very shortest answer is 'pocket knife blades are too short to see the sort of shear or torsional stress placed on a larger knife, so springiness is much less of an issue with them and you can get excellent use out of blades hardened about as far as they'll go.
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Take out a pocket knife with a 3 to 4 inch long blade and lay it on the counter. Then go get an 8 inch chef knife --don't even bother getting a 10 or 12 inch chef knife, just an 8 inch one will do, so long as it's a full tang knife -- and lay it next to that pocket knife. You will quickly see what I mean. The steel extends the length of the blade and handle both, in the chef knife. In the pocket knife the steel only extends half inch into the handle, then it stops and there's a junction -- i.e a point for flexing that will relieve the mechanical force placed on the steel, when the knife is being used to leverage something, like we're not supposed to use them for in normal circumstances. Stuff that doesn't have that sort of a flex point, like a solid steel blade or a piece of wood, sustains a lot more structural damage under load because 100% of the force is transmitted into the structural material instead of being harmlessly dispersed by the action of a hinge joint. As an example: if you take a long stick, it's typically easy to snap in two. Take a 1 inch section of that stick and try to snap it in two with your hands and you won't be able to. Is the 1 inch section of that stick suddenly stronger than the whole stick was? No, it's just harder to get as much bending going on, when you have a shorter length of material to work with. Well, chef knives aren't short, and when pushed past their tolerance they snap and shatter in situations where we as users would MUCH rather that they flex, and then snap back into place as they were before. This is why steel that can have a lot of spring at a usable Rockwell hardness is much more important to a kitchen knife than it ever could be to any pocket knife, no matter how expensive or well made. And that's why it's actually good news that Cromova 18 is actually 9Cr18MoV (when you put them side by side like that, it kinda doesn't seem like that big of a scoop, does it?) -- that'll actually do better in the kitchen than the vast majority of more expensive steels sold in folding knives.
Anyway, I'd prefer to buy something forged in one piece, like a Wusthof Classic -- but like I said those are a different cost entirely. It's probably more fair to compare these to the Gourmet line, and I see no reason I'd take the Wusthof Gourmet over this, at least on sight. It all matters how they fit the hand, especially if these are working knives. Your knives can't hurt at the end of the shift, they have no nerves. Your hands and wrists, those can hurt. Work angles matter and they're hard to judge by eyeballing.
The other thing is that this is probably a decent approximation for the four most useful knives to the average person. Some would say a long slicer is more useful than the all purpose serrated knife. I'd probably say a santoku is more useful than either of those in the round myself, but despite the ability of the individual cook to argue over which the fourth knife should be, I think it's certain that they got at least three of them right in this set.
reswright
3850
Jul 14, 2019
phoenixsongThx!
As you can see looking at the graph, in realistic terms the amount of rare alloy elements present in Cromova 18 are very low. The thing is, they're so low that they're what you'd expect to see from simple manufacturing cross contamination from different batches of steel being made on the same machinery. Like, if you ran a batch of non-vanadium steel through after you'd run some high vanadium steel, you would expect the non-vanadium steel you produced to have as much vanadium in it as Cromova 18 does. The same thing routinely happens with other alloys, like 9Cr18MoV/440B.
pwjlafontaine
Jul 13, 2019
I am not buying these as I already own a full set of knives but I wanted to weigh in with my opinion. A lot of my co-workers use global as their daily use knives in commercial kitchens and I've used them myself. The knives are well made, hold a great edge but are also easy to maintain and sharpen. My only gripe, and the reason I bought a set of Shun knives instead of global is because I found the handles too small for my hands.
pwjlafontaine
Jul 13, 2019
phoenixsongI haven't ever measured it? I use L nitrile gloves in my kitchen work.
blairw
6
May 8, 2019
Would these be a very good quality and well recommended high end starting knife set?
phoenixsong
1055
Jul 13, 2019
Oh well in the end I couldn't resist a Swiss Diamond Prestige essential 3-pc set deal at $56; got that instead :p
(Edited)
pwjlafontaine
Jul 13, 2019
phoenixsongI have no experience with those personally, but if you enjoy their performance and feel that's all the matters. Knives are a subjective and personal experience.
JLenz
38
May 8, 2019
Nice to see a set that is made up of probably all you actually would need as a home cook.
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