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How to Hold a Knife

Featured Author:

Chef Danielle Turner

As a personal chef, cooking instructor, and food writer, Chef Danielle is an expert in all things culinary. Her company, Great Taste – A Personal Chef Service, allows many members of Washington D.C.’s elite to enjoy restaurant-quality meals in their homes.

As a food writer, Chef Danielle has penned feature articles for The Food Network Holiday Survival Guide and The Food Network Summer Grilling Guide. Chef Danielle is a contributor to ChefsBest, where her how-to articles have covered planning a cheese tasting, creating simple place settings, and increasing antioxidants in your diet. She has also served as Contributing Editor at Restaurant Digest and written for Prince George’s Gazette and The Baltimore Sun. Chef Danielle also blogs at How to Boil an Egg.

She makes her home in the wilds of suburban DC with her husband and daughter.

More articles from this author:

• Break Out of Your Culinary Comfort Zone
• How to Buy a Chef's Knife and How to Use It
• 6 Things You Should Know About Chicken

I’ve taught scores of cooking classes over the years and if I had a dollar for every student with an improper grip on a knife, I could buy…well, I could buy something that costs A LOT of money. But no matter the class subject, no one leaves one of my cooking classes without being shown the correct way to hold a knife.

Wrong way to hold your knife!

I’m not sure how this epidemic started, but people always plant the top of their index finger on the back of the knife’s blade. (See picture to the below.) For whatever reason, this seems to give the false impression that you can control the direction of the knife with a firmly-planted index finger. NOT SO!

First step to holding your knife correctly.

The best (and safest) way to hold the knife is to use your thumb and index finger to grip the actual blade. (I know. I know. A knife has a handle and a handle implies that it should be, well, handled.) In this case, you’ll use the rest of your fingers to actually grip the portion of the handle closest to the blade.

Correct way to hold your knife.

This new and proper hold will feel strange the first 500 times you try it; but, boy, will that 501st time be worth it! Why is this hold better? First, you’re able to get a far more secure grip on the knife and because your grip is concentrated on one small area of the knife, you’ll have far more control as you slice or dice than you would with your fingers splayed across the entire handle. This hold also enables you to cut using the rocking motion that you see TV chefs use. This is not to be confused with the psychotic, blade-damaging chopping as seen on late night infomercials where chefs in tall toques try to hypnotize you into buying a knife that will cut a penny in half. (I’ve cooked all kinds of foods and seen all types of recipes and not once has a penny been on an ingredient list.)

Remember to grip the knife tightly in one hand and hold the item you’re cutting tightly in the other, fingers bent at the knuckle to keep you from cutting off your fingertips. Like anything, practice makes perfect so don’t get discouraged if you can’t keep time with Rachael Ray or Emeril right away.

If you hold the knife correctly, speed will come.

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