You don’t want boning knives for chopping up tough pieces of meat. If your goal is to separate a large chunk of meat into smaller chunks, you want a butcher knife. These rigid, strong blades are well-suited to carving and slicing meats; they can also saw into thick meats in a similar manner to how a bread knife can saw through bread and fruits. Their lightly curved shape is well-designed for cutting underneath the skin of meats and performing precise maneuvers, even if they’re less precise than a paring knife.
Butcher knives are somewhat similar to cleavers, which have giant square blades. Those are often used for cutting heavier meats, but they’re more cumbersome to wield. Chefs with larger knife collections often include both a butcher knife and a cleaver, but if you’re just starting out, Zakarian’s advice is a simple butcher knife should be all you need for those heavy-duty dinners. Over time, you might go for more specialized knives. However, according to Zakarian, he still usually sticks to a few favorites: “I have 250 knives in my knife drawer since I’ve been collecting for so many years, and probably I use five, because I go to the same one. It’s so beaten up, it looks like someone ran over it with a garbage truck. But that’s the knife that is my eye, my ear, and my hand.”
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