Here's Why Alton Brown Doesn't Think You Need A Paring Knife

Buying any given knife block will typically give you a whole bundle of blades that seem, at first, like they should cover any cooking occasion. Blades for chopping meat, deboning fish, slicing bread — the works. But you'll probably also get a paring knife, which can be useful sometimes, but if you're building a knife set piece by piece (which is better than buying a block), at least one chef says you shouldn't even bother with it.

Alton Brown, best known for his many, many TV shows on the Food Network, has a list of 10 knife buying tips on his website, and the very first entry trashes the paring knife. "I hate paring knives," he writes. "I don't even own one anymore." Instead, Brown recommends just three knives — a chef's knife, a serrated bread knife, and a utility blade — along with a pair of kitchen shears. This actually runs counter to our own recommendation of the only three knives you need in your kitchen, so ultimately it's up to you whether you prefer a paring knife or a utility blade. They can both be handy, but it's probably not worth having both.

It's understandable why Alton Brown might dislike paring knives — they're more limited in their applications than a utility knife, which splits the difference in length between a smaller paring and a longer chef's knife. Paring knives are good for peeling apples, slicing up small tomatoes, or deseeding. But anything bigger than your average sized apple will find the paring knife coming up short. Utility knives can handle the small stuff and carve up those bigger fruits and vegetables that require a heftier blade.

So maybe Brown is onto something. After all, if you're only going to keep a few knives around, a paring knife's range of use is awfully narrow. It's not a cut and dry rule, though — take the question of "paring knife versus utility knife" to Google and you'll find that the debate is alive and well on Reddit, Quora, and Stack Exchange. At the end of the day, a paring knife is good for specific tasks, whereas a utility knife is a jack-of-all-trades.

If you're interested in learning more, be sure to check out the one place in the kitchen you should never store your knives.