Kilne’s knife set offers solid bang-for-your-buck for burgeoning home cooks.
What is the Kilne Knife Set?
The Kilne Knife Set is the first product from Kilne Cookware, a new Canadian start-up from the same founder as the Endy mattress company. Kilne brings the same approach to cookware that Endy brought to mattresses, using a direct-to-consumer formula to bypass retail mark-ups and make a traditionally expensive investment more affordable.
The six-piece set features an 8” chef knife, a 7” Santoku knife, an 8” bread knife, a 3.5” paring knife, 4” kitchen shears, and a sharpening steel, which are all stored in an Acacia wood block. The Kilne team partnered with notable Canadian chefs Claudio Aprile and Suzanne Barr to put the knives to the test for home cooks before the set hit the market.
Why I love it
I came into possession of my first knife set the way I think many of us do: I picked up the cheapest block I could find from a big box store when I was furnishing my first apartment. I never put a lot of thought into the choice and that no-name block has made a permanent home on my kitchen counter since then.
The more I cooked over the years, however, the more I noticed how much the knives in my cheap, bulky set were lacking. They’re poorly balanced, too light, and dull easily. I started to consider scrapping my knife block altogether and building a set of individual knives one-by-one. But high-quality knives can cost well north of $200 each, which is no small price for smoother slicing.
Kilne’s knife set is turning out to be the perfect middle ground between a cheap knife block and a high-priced set of solo knives. The knives feel heavier and more balanced than my previous set — partly because they’re full tang, which means the steel extends all the way inside the handle (something I’m quite certain is not true of my previous set). The handle is also comfortable to hold and slip-resistant, even when you’re working with wet hands.
As someone with a tiny kitchen, I also love that Kilne’s knife set is slim and takes up about half the space of my old knife block. A common criticism of knife blocks is that the repetitive scraping every time knives are removed or put back dulls their blades too quickly. A few weeks into using it, however, I’m finding the soft wood inside the Kilne block’s holders has been gentle on the knives.
Overall, it’s a beautiful set for intermediate level cooks who aren’t quite ready to drop thousands of dollars on knives but want a set they can grow into as they continue to sharpen (pun intended) their cooking skills.
