Mac Superior 270mm(10.5")
Bread Knife Review

One more time I was curious about specific feature of the knife and I bought it. In this particular case, subject of my curiosity was the type of the serrations on the mac bread knife, plus relatively curved overall geometry of the knife. For last few years, Gude 7431/32 320mm(12.6") bread knife has been my primary bread knife, and even though I have used it for cutting things other than bread, that was mainly for testing, I have more than enough kitchen knives to pull out more than one knife per kitchen cutting task. Anyhow, this time I wanted to test and compare scalloped serrations on the Mac bread knife vs. standard serration pattern on Gude bread knife. Each have their pros and cons, and I just wanted to see/feel them first hand, besides I needed a present for a friend and this bread knife was one of those knives(designated presents).

General

Blade

Handle

Usage

Being a dedicated bread knife, obvious test number one was to cut the bread. I didn't have large variety of breads at home during the first test, in fact I only had one variety of bread, which wasn't particularly had crust, but not very soft wither. Sliced the bread into very thin slices, pretty much translucent pieces, and thanks to very high sharpness the job was very easy. After that I went to search for other types of bakery at home and the only thing I've found a single Panettone, which is quite soft and tends to crumble way too much if the blade isn't sharp. Mac superior handled the task very well. That concluded the bakery section of the tests that day. Although, as an update have to add that two weeks later I had a chance to cut hard crust bread with the Mac Superior knife and at that time even though it has been already used for other works(not by me, but by its owner), the knife still retained much of its initial sharpness, cutting through really hard crust bread easily. That's one of the very few things where serrations work much better compared to even the sharpest and thinnest edges. Mainly because of the damage inflicted to the edge by hard crust. Like I said, personally, I have no reason to use bread knife for anything but bread cutting, for all other cutting jobs I need to deal with in my kitchen I have more than one knife per task at my disposal, however, majority of the people, especially those who are not really into kitchen knife collecting and pampering often use serrated bread knives for variety of curing chores including meat, vegetables, and sadly, other no food related items such as packaging and whatever else. So, because of those reasons, and because I wanted to use the knife for longer period of time to properly assess handle comfort during the use I've decided to conduct the rest of the test during the weekend, when I was making the mega salad with 20 different kinds of veggies in it, and at the same time I'd have a chance to use it as a meat slicer.

Usage - Vegetables Simply put, serrated knives are no good choice for vegetables compared with more specialized vegetable knives such as gyuto, nakiri, usuba or santoku. Still, Mac superior fared much better that Gude bread knife for this part of the test. Smooth, clean cuts, little effort making them, overall it was pretty good. I am well aware that there are more than one sources advising to use serrated knives for vegetables, but frankly, I doubt any of them had used truly sharp knife. At least from the personal experience there is no comparison. Anyway, back to the Mac Superior bread knife. Veggie test started with the harsh stuff including carrots, cut into batonnet, followed by broccoli, which was minced rather finely. Crowns were minced off the board, and after that I've proceeded with the stems, slicing them into small cubes about 5mm in size. Overall performance was very good. Next step was the Brussels sprouts, first cutting the ends, then cutting them in halves and finally mincing them. The knife does fine with slicing things, but if you have to use chopping which is handy when trying to mince stuff finely serrated edge isn't the best choice, straight one does much better. That was pretty clear after trying to mince Brussel's sprouts for a while. Next up, Italian parsley. based on the previous test, I've skipped mince on the board part and tried to use just slicing motion to cut is as finely as I could. Took some time, but whatever. Chiffonade from collard greens was a similar experience, slicing was easy, cuts were very clean. I've processed few other type of vegetables including bell pepper, baby spinach, green onions, red radish etc. In the end, main problem was the absence of the sharp point, which is occasionally needed when working with vegetables.

Usage - Meat I've had about 4lbs of meat, which I wasn't really gonna cook all at once, but for the sake of testing and because I was running out of time, as in I had to present the knife to its future owner. First I've sliced the large pieces intro stripes, about 1" thick, then examined the slices, plus I've made couple slices with much sharper, designated meat slicer which in this case was Watanabe Kintaro-Ame Sujihiki knife. You might wonder why did I have decide to continue comparison with sujihiki in this case, but at that time it was abundantly clear Mac Superior was indeed superior over Gude in terms of making clean cuts and there was no point in continuing the same test. Gude is better at ripping stuff and Mac Superior is better at cutting. At this time I wanted to gauge slicing performance, hence the choice of the sujihiki. Obviously, slicing with Watnabe sujihiki was easier, simply because it is longer and has thinner and sharper edge as well. Chunk of the raw meat was approx 8" long and I could slice though it in a single motion with Watanabe Sujihiki, while it took two slices with Mac superior to do the same. Visual comparison of the cuts showed what I was expecting and was every obvious, thin, sharp edge of the sujihiki made cleaner cut. Other than that, nothing really interesting. Mac superior did respectable job, and unless you are really demanding about clean cuts you wouldn't complain about it, but the point is, the knife was very sharp, and that was the key. Once the knife gets duller, results will be worse and like I said, sharpening this type of serrations is no joy.

Conclusions