Most people can buy an opinel and be happy for decades. You don't need anything fancy for a general purpose knife. $50 max, and that's if you're feeling like getting something special.

Expensive steels are, by and large, incremental progress over cheaper knife steels, provided it got an appropriate heat treatment and has good edge geometry. In almost no applications will an end consumer notice the difference.

Knives get stupid beyond a certain price point.

I've been using the same thrift store knife I picked up 15 years ago. It gets sharpened maybe once a year, honed every so often. It was like $20 i think? Most chefs I know have a similar story with their knife/knives, something cheap that does the job.

Spending more on knives is just status symbol nonsense, which unfortunately has infected absolutely everything. It's like spending $300 on a spanner wrench. Who in the hell spends that much on a wrench? Why would you spend that much on a knife? lol. It's what you do with it that matters.

I remember seeing a comment by a local "celebrity chef" where he said he never sharpens cleavers - he just buys a specific inexpensive brand 5 at a time for $8 each and throws them away when they become dull.

While I don't agree with externalising the manufacture/disposal costs with that sort of disposable consumption, I do see the economically-rational decision making behind it.

If you're running a restaurant in Australia, your lowest paid kitchen staff get $24 an hour during weekdays, 30-35 and hour on weekends, and as much as $55 an hour on public holidays. And if they work more than 8 hours in a day it's 1.5 times those rates for the first 2 hours of overtime, and double those rates for anything more than 2 hours overtime. https://www.fairwork.gov.au/find-help-for/fast-food-restaura...

While spending 15 or 20 seconds honing the edge with a sharpening steel during use makes sense (and I'll bet he does that just out of reflex), once the edge gets damaged enough to need more that what a steel can fix and you start needing a whetstone, it's probably not cost effective to have kitchen staff spend time doing that.

If a dull knife takes whole 5 minutes to sharpen, it's 12 knives an hour. At $8 per knife, this is $96 per hour. Not worth it during deep overtime during a public holiday, otherwise...

I suppose someone less handsomely paid collects these disposed knives, sharpens them, and resells them on the side.

I'd take issue with your price point but agree with the sentiment

I've seen victorinox fibrox knives in Michelin Star kitchens, they get the job done and are very reasonably priced ($60 for a chef's knife).

Admittedly the knives I have at home are significantly more expensive largely because the knives I have at home are on display so I want something that looks good and I actually enjoy using them.

On one level it's a little silly but then on another level people spend thousands on art/sculptures which has no useful purpose.

There are lots of great knife makers. Depends on what you want. Knives become about aesthetics and feel pretty quickly, price point wise. Not cutting functionality (ease of cutting, whatever).

Victorinox knives rank very well in just about any real-use ranking I’ve ever seen and are extremely affordable. If you just want good knives that will serve you well, won’t break the bank, and you won’t feel bad using them, that’s what I would do. There are other good recommendations in the thread as well.

As for custom steels - outside of currently very expensive processes (powdered metallurgy, etc), it is basically “maximum sharpness”, “edge retention”, “ease of sharpening”, pick maybe two. Edge retention here is shorthand for both brittleness (chipping) and abrasion resistance (regular wear), even though they differ for some things.

High grade carbide, for example, is extremely tough and resists edge abrasion. But because of the large grain size it is ~impossible to get it as sharp as carbon steel by hand. Additionally, the same abrasion resistance also means you need something hard enough to sharpen it.

If you remember those little scratch kits you may have played with once in science class as a child where you tried to see which rocks scratches other rocks, this is the practical application of that.

Even in metalworking people will often make or use hss cutters when they need something really really sharp or custom. Or just cheap. And use carbide ones when they don’t. Because you really can’t get carbide as sharp as HSS and sometimes it matters. I can also easily make a really good HSS cuttter, but making a really good carbide one would take significantly more expensive tooling and time.

This is one example.

Ceramic knives[1] tend to have very high edge retention, but are very brittle and fracture easily. So it's very easy to nick them. This makes them last forever if you are slicing but not if you are chopping. They are also ~impossible to sharpen without diamonds.

In the end - we can construct steels and other things with very nice properties at high cost, and it's cool and fun to explore the limits there, but it’s not going to make you a better chef, or make your prep 10x faster or whatever. This isn't to say it's completely impossible to make somethign that is awesome at everything, but we use what we use because we can make them without nudging atoms into a matrix one by one :)

So while it's possible to get 5x the edge life out of an impossible to sharpen knife (for example), for most people, it's not worth it. They don't even notice once the novelty wears off.

[1] Tungsten carbide is really a ceramic but people often mistake it for a metal/steel, when in reality it's often just alloyed/glued/etc to metals, etc. Assume i'm not talking about tungsten here.