Let’s try a “hocho”, a Japanese kitchen knife.

One characteristic of Japanese cuisine is the harmonic beauty composed by seasonal foods which are arranged clearly and cooked delicately, colorful Japanese Chinese dishes which provide a stage for the foods and black Japanese lacquer boxes. Clearly arranged and delicately cooked? Yes, and sharply. A cut surface of fresh fish or a simmered green vegetable by cutting it into bite sized pieces. These which are made by a Japanese kitchen knife, a hocho, can add well-prepared skills to foods. Hocho is indispensable to Japanese cuisine.

Surely the cutting ability is the core of hocho. To cut a hard big fresh fish like a tuna easily, to make a smooth cut surface of “sashimi” or to make extremely thin vegetable strings from a Japanese radish, these are gripping of abilities of the hocho.

Moreover, it is not known much to foreign people that a sharply cut food by hocho are more delicious taste. For example, squid is able to be caught in all the seas in Japan, fresh squid is delicious with reasonable payment and Japanese people love it. Nonetheless, a good squid sushi on the surface with lengthwise and crosswise cuts delicately is another food in a couple of upper levels different from normal squid sushi, it is smoother and sweeter. At my favorite sushi bar in Kanazawa the sushi chef makes a squid sushi by high-leveled skill of hocho. He makes a rectangular fresh squid peel normally and he cuts the thin peel lengthwise along the edge to two thinner peels. Next he cuts the two squid peels into a lot of squid strings thinner than matchsticks.

This note is written about the hocho, but the hocho is only a tool for cutting, so it’s better for you to look at a scene of a sushi chef cutting a fish by hocho at an expensive sushi bar ( except conveyer belt sushi bars).

The human tongue senses five tastes of food, sweet, bitter, sour, salty and umami. In addition the human tongue feels good or bad sensation. Good sensation can add a better taste to that food on the tongue, on the other hand bad sensation adds a worse taste to that food. So Japanese people say that tasting food is to put food on one’s tongue. This is acknowledged by a good French chef who has no custom of cutting by hocho at an experimental competition between a normal cut squid sushi and a skillfully cut squid sushi. For Japanese cuisine which has the enjoyment of natural ingredient taste, the hocho is absolutely necessary.

The picture above is my hocho set. From left to right a normal utility hocho, a fish hocho, a sashimi hocho and a vegetable hocho. These are for left-handed person, so each single steel edge is on the left side of iron knife body. Cooking is one of my hobbies, so I bought those hocho one after another along my aspiration for my cooking skills. For me rather than an actual skill-up, it is important to throw myself into the world of Japanese chefs with good hocho. The feature of Japanese hocho is that all the hocho have a single edge, which can cut sharply and make a cutting surface smooth.

I am an amateur cooker, but by using hocho my cooking is more enjoyable.

Recently many foreign chefs buy many hocho so as to add some skill-up to their cooking, and foreign travelers buy many hocho for their own cooking or their souvenirs.

Big cities have many hocho speciality shops. At Kappa-Bashi of Taito ward in Tokyo, at Sennichimae of Chuo ward in Osaka and at Nishiki Market of Chuo Ward in Kyoto.

Let’s try to cut many ingredients by hocho.

Hocho doesn’t brake the cells of vegetables. If you cut a tomato by hocho, you can recognize a smooth cut surface with keeping the juice within the cut tomato piece. It looks fresh and it introduces good appetites.

Hocho shows an excellent performance to many meats as well. If you cut a terrine of French cuisine by hocho, the cut surface is so smooth that the taste of terrine is upgraded.