Can you imagine your kitchen without the serrated knife? It's the only way to cut bread without squishing it, the same for tomatoes.

Is the serrated knife the greatest thing since sliced bread? No, says American Profile. Joseph Burns' invention came 10 years before the first loaf-at-a-time bread slicer. According to Geocuse, Joseph E. Burns, a Syracuse resident, invented the serrated bread knife in 1919.

His grooved blade improved the lives of bakers and kitchen connoisseurs worldwide by making it easier to slice bread without squishing it. Burns then went on to patent a sharpening device for edged blades in 1940.

According to Wikipedia:

The serrated knife design had sections of grooves or serrations that form individual small cutting edges which were perpendicular to the blade and thus cut without the excessive normal pressure required of a scalloped blade and without the horizontal force required by positive-raked teeth that would dig into the bread like a wood saw. There were also sections of grooves with the opposite direction of inclination, separated by a section of smooth blade, and the knife thus cut cleanly in both directions in both hard and soft bread.

An offset serrated knife uses an offset handle to ensure the cook's knuckles will not touch the cutting surface when the blade has cut all of the way through the food.

Names for the parts of a knife: 

  • Spine – the back of the blade
  • Point – the sharp and tapered end of the knife
  • Edge – the sharp part of the knife, the blade itself — the one that does most of the chopping, cutting, mincing, etc.
  • Tip – the part between the point and the edge of the knife. It is used mostly for detailed or delicate cutting.
  • Heel – the lower part of the blade.
  • Bolster – the thick part that connects the knife handle and the blade, which keeps your hand from accidentally slipping onto the blade (in case your hand gets wet or slippery).
  • Scale – the handle of the knife
  • Tang – the unsharpened part of the blade that extends to which the scale is attached.
  • Rivets – these are fasteners that join the scale to the tang, forming the handle.
  • Butt – the end of a knife’s handle.

Types of kitchen knives:

  • The bread knife has a serrated edge that allows for evenly cutting bread without crushing or breaking it.
  • Butter knives are table knives with dull rounded tip. The edges can be finely serrated or non-serrated at all.
  • A carving knife is a big knife used to cut thin, delicate slices of meats and fish.
  • Butcherknife is a knife specifically designed for butchering animal carcasses. It is also used in dressing the meat.
  • A boning knife is used for removing bones from the meat. It is also called “cleaver.”
  • The Oyster knife has a short, thick blade specifically made for prying oyster shells open.

Since we're talking about knives, we might as well take it a step further and bring up the fact that the world-renowned Sherrill Manufacturing, the last remaining flatware manufacturer in the United States, is in our back yard.

The company has been producing quality flatware for more than a century. It acquired the flatware manufacturing assets from Oneida Limited, which was the largest flatware manufacturer in the U.S. market. Due to financial issues, Sherrill Manufacturing could no longer be exclusively tied to Oneida Limited and was forced to diversify their customer base by adding their own flatware patterns and brand under the Liberty Tabletop label.

President Trump added Sherrill Manufacturing's Liberty Tabletop's silver-plated Betsy Ross patterned utensils to the White House after New Hartford's Claudia Tenney cornered the President, pitched it, and then closed the deal.

LOOK: Famous Historic Homes in Every State

 

More From Big Frog 104