Review: Misen Chef’s Knife

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A new chef’s knife from Misen promises high-quality steel, a santoku-like blade angle and free re-sharpening for life – all for $65.

OF ALL the tools and equipment that can fill a kitchen, knives are probably the most personal and indispensable. Admire one in a chef’s collection and be prepared for them to tell you their story, but don’t expect them to offer to try it out. My own collection is modest, but I’m proud of it. Among them, my favorites are a classic Wüsthof kitchen knife and my Tadafusa Santoku. The Wüsthof can do everything from mincing a shallot to carving a chicken, while the Santoku’s sharper blade angle cuts vegetables like a scalpel.

A new chef’s knife from Misen promises the best of both knives, making gigantic claims about innovative geometry, high-quality steel, a santoku-style blade angle and a free lifetime sharpening. Most impressively, he boasts what he calls an “honest price” of $65, a figure that is less than half the price of the high-end knives he calls his competitors.

Curious, I called one of them up to test it out. Misen launched on Kickstarter, but isn’t shipping his knives until this fall. A few days later, I had my chef’s knife, my santoku, and the Misen chef’s knife lined up side by side on my cutting board. The most striking feature of the Misen was the side view, which somewhat resembled both knives, combining the flatter belly of the Santoku and both the handle and the upward sweep at the tip of the chef’s knife, a sort of Westernized version of a Japanese knife known as a gyuto.

I bought a bag full of food products to chop and declared that the game had begun. The differences between the three knives became immediately apparent. While the Misen most closely resembles a traditional chef’s knife, it doesn’t really act like one. The Wüsthof has a wide, curved “belly,” a German style that encourages a tilting cutting motion in which the tip of the knife rests on the board and the back moves up and down as the whole thing slides back and forth with each stroke. The Santoku style relies more on keeping the flatter blade parallel to the cutting board and sliding forward with each downward motion.

For me, the misen often felt more comfortable when struck santoku style. This was especially noticeable when I was working on something tall, like a piece of cabbage, or chopping up a bunch of herbs. If you try to use a motion that allows the Wüsthof to do this kind of work with the Misen, it will feel like you hear a dull thump every time the length of the blade touches the cutting board. That being said, I was convinced that the best gesture for anything I would cut with the Misen would become obvious over time and I would get better with time.

Preparatory work
In my test of strength with three knives against a grocery bag, the Misen never became my weapon of choice. The first thing I worked on was cutting bacon into quarter-inch cubes for a potato and leek soup. Cutting the thick slices into long strips was fine, but when I moved to cross-cutting, things got …. tricky. The Wüsthof cut cleanly and produced sharp corners and edges. The Misen needed a clumsy and exaggerated stroke to achieve the same result, otherwise it easily crushed the cubes. It had similar difficulty with the final strokes used to cut a red bell pepper into small brunoise cubes.

Like the Wüsthof, the Misen used its weight to easily slice a Russian potato, and like the Wüsthof, the slices stuck to the side of the knife with the force of a suction cup, a common problem my Santoku avoided thanks to the imprint on the side of its blade. All three knives were used on leeks and chives. The Wüsthof and the Misen cut a chicken admirably into pieces, even through the breastbone, which I would not do with my Santoku.

On the other hand, the Santoku is my knife of choice for most vegetables unless it’s something very solid that I need to lean on, but here I noticed something special. The Misen advertises its 15 degree blade angle, as opposed to the wider angle of most chef’s knives, but just like my Wüsthof, the Misen never looked like my Santoku, which looks like a scalpel.

Checking the blade
Despite these reservations, the attractive price tag stayed in my mind, and I called two bladesmiths to find out what was going on.

“Most people judge their sharpness in the first 10 minutes after use,” said Daniel O’Malley of Epicurean Edge in Kirkland, Washington, explaining that a diligent knife sharpener can give most knives a fairly sharp edge, but that low-quality blades won’t retain that sharpness for long. “Actually, we should be interested in how they feel about it 12 months later”.

On the phone, I referred O’Malley to the Misen website, where the company explains what makes its knives special and how they hold up against more expensive competition. He was silent for a while.

The first thing Blacksmith O’Malley wondered about was the type of steel Misen uses. AUS-8 is nothing special,” O’Malley said. It’s a medium-grade Japanese steel. He also asked about the percentage of carbon Misen uses in its comparison: 0.8% for Misen versus 0.6% for the competition. “Carbon is just one element among many,” O’Malley explained. “Too much carbon makes the product brittle. They don’t know what ‘premium’ means.”

The composition of a knife’s steel determines properties such as grip and sharpness, as well as rust resistance. More carbon makes a blade harder, which is usually a good thing, but also more susceptible to rust, which means you need to pamper it a little more. Molybdenum, for example, is another hardener that also makes a blade less brittle. Composition is a balancing act. My Wusthöf blade, for example, is made of the highly regarded X50CrMoV15, which produces a knife with good sharpness and high corrosion resistance. Its hardness is 56 on the Rockwell scale, which is about the lowest you can get on that scale. Misen claims an impressive 58-59 value. Most knives that are in the low 60s retail for nearly $150 and often much more.

“Really, though,” O’Malley said. “The innovation of Misen is in the price, and $65 is what I expect from a well-made knife from China.” While Misen’s four-page website mentions Japanese steel three times, there’s no mention of China, so I emailed a representative, who replied that “the main manufacturing partners for heat treating, assembling, polishing, grinding and other knife-making processes are located in China.”

O’Malley had already warned about Chinese-made knives; most of them tend not to maintain the hardness they claim. Suddenly, things seemed a bit lax and fast for a knife that claims to be able to compete with $140 knives.

Wheel of Pain
O’Malley was about to fly to Japan for a week-long trip in search of knives, so he contacted master blade smith Bill Burke in Idaho to take a look at the state of things 12 months later.

Burke’s results were overwhelming. He used a Rockwell hardness tester to verify Misen’s hardness data.

“The performance of this knife is very poor,” Burke said. “It’s only about as good as an old Chicago Cutlery knife. The hardness test gave 51.5 [Rockwell] at the heel, 51 in the middle and then up to 56 near the tip.

Chicago Cutlery aside, the results were so surprising and the hardness so much lower than the 58-59 indicated by Misen that Burke recalibrated his machine and tested it again with a different method, but one that gave the same results. He even ran the machine again with a standardized steel block, which gave exactly the right results.

Burke realized that the different hardness values – not a good thing – were probably the result of improper heat treatment and cooling, meaning that the thicker parts of the blade were softer. (See my photo.) This meant that while it was possible to apply a proper edge as on any other knife, it quickly dulled and had the highly undesirable property of deteriorating with each sharpening, as you worked in the thicker, softer center of the blade.

When Burke began testing the way he was cutting, he sent me a picture of the blistering that was forming on his finger where it came into contact with the back of the knife. He also found that the cutting angle did not match the one indicated by Misen, which explained why I was getting results similar to a chef’s knife and not a santoku knife. He also performed a blade cutting test with a scale to see how much pressure was needed to cut a hemp rope repeatedly. He compared it to a pair of Japanese knives that retail for $129 to $189, and these required only 10 to 22 pounds of pressure for repeated cuts. The Misen required between 19 and 32 pounds. The Chicago Cutlery knife that Burke bought for $12 at Walmart required almost the same pressure as the Misen – between 21 and 32 pounds.

We contacted Misen, and the company says it was surprised to learn of our hardness test results. Misen says it targets a hardness of 58-59 for its knives, and when batches of steel were tested for hardness during production, every batch fell within that range. As for our findings on edge angle, the company says the edges are hand sharpened so some variance is to be expected. The company says that over time, it will tighten the tolerance ranges for hand sharpening and that over time, consumers will see less deviation from the 15-degree target.

It’s also worth noting that O’Malley owns a knife store and makes Burke knives, so Misen, which sells knives directly through its website, represents a form of competition to a lesser extent.

The knife is in
In the end, I had to think about cars. At home, I had my Wüsthof, which looked like a reliable, tank-like Mercedes E-Class. Next to it was my Miata-like Santoku, when I wanted something sportier. Blade Forge’s warnings against the Miros gave me the impression of a car that looks great and drives well when you pull it out of the parking lot, but ends up spending a lot of time in the shop, much like a Ford Probe.

My advice? If you’re short on cash and need a kitchen knife fast, try the Forschner/Victorinox Fibrox, which you can get for about $40. If you have a little more money, but still under $100, try a Mac Superior or the Tojiro DP. And if you want something like my Wüsthof, it’s pretty easy to find on sale for less than a C-note.