A question about kitchen knives: why is a Chinese cleaver good ... it seems so big ... ?

Question

... and yet I have seen it recommended for 'little' jobs like working with garlic, herbs, dicing ...

...how is it superior to a long plain Western knife ... ?

I can see for hacking apart chicken it would be good, especially jointing it, but other than that, what larger tasks
does it do well?

**** what is a meat cleaver used for?
**** and a boning knife, please?

thank you ever so much ... have a lovely day!

Answer 1

A Chinese cleaver is a good "workhorse" of the kitchen.... good for hacking through bones and chunking up veggies for a mire poix.

A french chefs knife is another good workhorse that can also be used for smaller jobs. You can use the end closest to the handle for chopping up veggies, turn it on its side to mash garlic, use the tip for smaller slicing and dicing. There is another knife, a santoku, that is pretty awesome too. Its used for more fine cuts (when you are working on julienne, brunoise, batonnet, small and medium dice) but since its a more fine tool, you might want to set that aside when you have a chicken or fish to fabricate.

A boning knife is used for boning (hehe). Well, more precisely it is good for filleting fish since most of the time they are very thin and pretty flexible, which helps contour to strange shapes.

A meat cleaver is pretty much the same thing as a chinese cleaver.

If you have money for it, these are all wonderful knives for a culinarian to possess. But if you are on a budget, as most of us are, then a good quality french chefs knife is all that you really need. My set as a student (which I purchased on my own) was a honing steel, a french chefs knife (which is probably what I use the most) a flexible boning knife and a paring knife.

Answer 2

A cleaver makes preparing garlic easy. One whack with the side of the blade and the clove is crushed completely allowing you to simply lift away the skin.A few chops and into the dish it goes.it must take about 20 seconds.

Compare that to peeling off the skin with a knife and then poncing about with a garlic press before having to wash the damn thing up after having teased all those bits of garlic out of the holes.

In short a cleaver is so versatile which is why the Chinese use them.

Answer 3

**** what is a meat cleaver used for?
A large blade knife or cleaver gives one more control when slicing or fine chopping. They will not slip or slide.
Also used for chopping thru joints or gristle, spare ribs etc.

**** and a boning knife, please?
Used for removing bones, such as boning a whole chicken, slicing pockets, (pork pocket chops), trimming meat from bones such as legs and trimming waste for grinding.