Looking Sharp! - a guide to cheese knives

Learn more about using cheese knives for cheese boards, in our classroom where you can get homework and a pdf -here: shopboardsandco.com/blogs/cla...
You need to have knives if you're going to cut your cheese, but you don't have to have all of these. I think it's important that we show you what each knife does and you can decide which one is the best or which ones are the best for you. So we have a lot to choose here from
and I want to start with one that I think is actually the least useful and that is the cheese plane.
Now why is that not useful? Let me show you if you want to use this and put it out with your cheese on your cheese board, you need to have it with a firm knife. You wouldn't use it with a brie or with the gouda and watch what I have to do with my left hand to make this work. I actually have to hold that. So you're asking your guests to hold that piece of cheese. So every person who's going to cut a piece of cheese has got to do that. Now, this is the good part of a plane. So I think planes are really cool, the cheese planes, cheese slicers, but for a cheese board. Now, that is a beautiful curl and I did it off this hard cheese. I could do this with Parmesan over a Caesar salad. I can use it with chocolate over a cake, and I have a good friend who gave me the tip of using it for ice-cold butter and then putting that on your toast. So no more like smooshing your fresh toast, with the ice-cold butter that you can't get to melt.
Now you just do a little bit and have magic butter on your toast. So a great tool to have, not so great for making your cheese boards, so that's the cheese plane.
So let's talk about knives for the actual cheese board making and we have knives and something I like to call and it is called a cheese lyre. I also call it a harp. Sometimes it's called the bow harp. Sometimes it's called - they make bigger ones that are called Roquefort harp because they're used to slice blue cheese. I love blue cheese. This tiny little wire there which is
tightened on the ends with these little screws. This is actually something we sell at shopboardsandco.com is perfect for making slices. So now I've got a little slice of chevre here, this is just plain chevre. I could before I do this drizzle it with some beautiful jam or jelly, but what I like about this, let me move my brie out of the way, is that it has very little contact with the cheese so it doesn't stick.
Now, can you remember, like, cutting a piece of cheesecake or maybe like whole cheesecake and you're serving it up and after you get to the second piece like that cheesecake is just sticking to the knife. So some of our cheeses today would benefit from the same kind of knife that you could use for your cheesecake. But this is cutting through this so beautifully.
If you could imagine that it drizzled with a jam, like a red pepper jelly or something. That is a perfect slice option for that. Again, this is easy to clean. I'm just going to wipe this off into our basket there. And that is our cheese wire. So that is a really handy tool. And you could also again, let's talk about butter for a second. You could cut butter into paths and then put them out. You’re making the absolutely perfect breakfast brunch board, not a charcuterie board,
but a breakfast brunch board. You could slice up nice little ice cold paths of butter. So that is our lyre. Now let's talk on the same note, we were just talking about the cheesecake, about our brie knife or our soft cheese knife. So notice how this has so much less knife surface than what is our traditional cheese knife. That is because you want it to stick less. So this actually is a really good knife to also use for cheesecake or something else like that that has that high moisture content that just wants to stick to the knife like crazy. So we will talk about cutting cheese and how to cut it in a different video. But mostly what we want to do is start from the center. If you imagine, we had a whole piece and we're cutting this, like a pizza, but this will cut beautifully through these slices and this is a brie that is not too gooey, but it will work with a gooey knife too. If it's super gooey, it will still kind of stick to it, but you'll be able to pull it out. Might need to wipe it off every once in a while, but this is great.
It doesn't use that sort of suction. It comes off easily. But a thicker knife like this would work less well. It would just want to stick on it like a big suction cup. So a brie knife is especially good.
Especially if you're a big fan of brie, Camembert triple brie, stuff like that, look for a knife that has very little surface area. So there's our first set of knives here. I'm going to rotate our magic Cheese Board of Cutting. We already saw our beautiful firm aged gouda, and we have a video for just nuggeting as well. But this, you can use a parm knife for nuggeting this and breaking off big pieces, which is great.

[@IonTrone]

very helpful explainer!

[@Buxtonphil]

Very informative thank you.

[@cherylwhitlock366]

This is a great video.