# Tojiro ITK bread knifeand how to select a bread knife



## mark76

When the Tojiro ITK 270 mm bread knife arrived, it was immediately the ugliest knife in the house. By far. And the least ergonomic knife. Its unattractive, bulky, squarish, black pakkawood handle was too big, even for my large hands.






So the first thing I did, after slicing a couple of breads with it, was to have the knife rehandled. Frederiek de Vette made a beautiful handle out of spalted maple burl for me. Even though I have quite a few knives with custom handles by now, this one is special. Whenever I look at it, I need to touch it. The curves just feel so good in the hand.





I got the knife to cut bread. Sandwich bread, flatbread, rye bread, cornbread, sourdough bread, focaccia, ciabatta, pita, yufka, baguettes, bagels, buns, cakes, rolls, crumpets, by now the knife has cut them all.



And it has done so very well.

The nice thing about this knife is that it actually cuts. It doesnt rip bread apart and it produces relative little crumbs. 





*How to select a bread knife*

My criteria for a bread knife are quite different from those for other knives. I want a gyuto to be made of a hard steel that is easy to sharpen and to have a nice geometry and a profile with a long flat spot. But most of these things dont interest me when considering a bread knife. To me the single most important thing in a bread knife is... the shape of its serrations.






For most types of bread you dont even need a bread knife. A sharp gyuto works well on them. And it hardly produces any crumbs. Only for breads with hard crusts or crusts with hard pieces in them, a serrated knife is an advantage. Such a knife concentrates its pressure on the tips of the serrations. Thus the cutting surface is reduced and the force on the bread is larger. Moreover, once the tips of the serrations have penetrated the crust of the bread, the serrations aid in cutting the long fibers of the bread.

Not all serrations are equal. My Tojiro knife has what one might call rounded serrations.



But serrations can have many other shapes.






The rounded serrations of my Tojiro (very similar to those of the Wüsthoff Gourmet) are a bit less aggressive than the saw tooth serrations of, e.g., a Wüsthoff Xline bread knife. So I need a bit more pressure to cut the crust of hard breads. The advantage is that my knife produces much less bread crumbs. This is a general trade-off: more aggressive teeth cut hard crusts easier, but they result in more crumbs. If you hate bread crumbs, by the way, there even exist special cutting boards for bread. (No, I dont own one.)





Another consideration when getting a bread knife is its profile, particularly the rounding. My Tojiro knife is slightly rounded, which makes slicing a bit easier to me. A knife with a similar profile is the MAC Superior bread knife. But there are plenty of bread knives that have an entirely straight edge, should you prefer this. Examples are most Wüsthoff and Kai Shun bread knives and the Güde bread knife.

The final consideration for a bread knife is its length. I prefer a long knife, since it allows me to slice long breads lengthwise. And Ive got a short sandwich knife, also known as a tomato knife or a sausage knife in my local cook shop, to cut soft buns. I hardly use this sandwich knife, by the way, since I use a gyuto or a petty to slice buns. (Ive also got a steak knife which I dont use for steaks--what crook has devised that a steak knife should be serrated? But the steak knife works great on pizza, which is also a kind of bread.)





*Conclusion*

The Tojiro ITK is a long bread knife with rounded serrations. It works well on hard crusts, though one needs slightly more force than with a knife that has saw tooth serrations. But it produces far less crumbs. I dont know what steel the Tojiro is made of and I honestly dont care.

*Factsheet*

Click on the factsheet for a larger version.


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## Mucho Bocho

Nice write up Mark


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## apathetic

Nice one!
I think the bread knife is made of molybdenum.


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## icanhaschzbrgr

Nice review, Mark!
After rehandling your Tojiro looks lovely. 

I've been using Tojiro ITK on a daily basis as we usually eat a lot of bread. And the only downside (apart from the poor stock handle) I could name is that it's a pain to sharpen. Luckily it doesn't needs to be sharpened often, but after a year and a half in our kitchen it definitely needed some sharpening.


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## TurboScooter

I really like the profile line drawings and the data sheets in your reviews, but may I make a technical suggestion about them?

JPG is the wrong image format for those; JPG is best suited for photographs. Because those images only contain text and line drawings, you should get a much better quality image saving as GIF or PNG. The text will be much more crisp, and you won't get the mosquito noise compression artifacts.


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## El Pescador

Great right up. I ended up owning both a MAC and the Tojiro. I preferred the MAC and the Tojiro ended up in a drawer. Ill need to go back and try to remember why I chose it over the Tojiro.


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## spoiledbroth

Mark, 

Love your write ups! Also really like the graphics you provide with information, I can tell you are a very thorough person. Vendors and mass producers (or craftsmen) would do well to start detailing knives in such a fashion.

Also, you forgot to change the label on your graph from the last review (the goko damascus).

As someone else said, you should save your graphics with text as gif or png, they should look much smoother.


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## WildBoar

well damn, you sure raised the bar for knife reviews 

Agree wholeheartedly about a rehandled Tojiro ITK. We've had one now for 3-4 years, and it does regular duty slicing up large crusty loaves of rustic breads. Much, much better than the Wushtof it replaced -- less tearing, longer blade length and the curve helps.


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## aboynamedsuita

Excellent review a usual, interesting to see one about a bread knife. I've also heard that it is a molybdenum stainless steel


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## spoiledbroth

Tojiro used to list it as part of the SD molybdenum vanadium line.


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## aboynamedsuita

The moly bread knives seem pretty common, Misono uses it and I've seen a Sakai Takayuki (hope I spelled that correctly) version that looked identical to the Misono.


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## TurboScooter

mark76 said:


>



The knife with the scalloped serrations labeled as the Wustof Gourmet says Wusthof Classic on it.

I got curious and started searching - it looks like Wusthof has a pattern called "Super Slicer" in several of their lines, and they all have the scalloped serrations.



tjangula said:


> Excellent review a usual, interesting to see one about a bread knife. I've also heard that it is a molybdenum stainless steel



On the net some places say the F-687 bread knife is a DP knife with VG-10. However, Tojiro themselves list it in their SD line - http://tojiro.net/jp/store/index.php?dispatch=products.view&product_id=422 . It says molybdenum vanadium in Japanese. The DP line says "DP&#12467;&#12496;&#12523;&#12488;&#21512;&#37329;&#37628;&#21106;&#36796;" or "DP colbalt alloy steel warikomi".


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## daveb

No Gude?


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## spoiledbroth

The Gude has wavy serrations doesn't it?


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## SousVideLoca

Here's the Gude's edge profile (photo shamelessly stolen from Dave Martell):


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## aboynamedsuita

I may be getting the Z-Kramer Damascus if my plan for the LE2 chefs knife falls through, I think it looks like the xline


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## mark76

Thanks guys for your comments!



icanhaschzbrgr said:


> And the only downside (apart from the poor stock handle) I could name is that it's a pain to sharpen. Luckily it doesn't needs to be sharpened often, but after a year and a half in our kitchen it definitely needed some sharpening.



Thats true. I use my Wicked Edge to sharpen the sharpened side of the blade. Then I remove the burr on the flat side with a few passes on a stone. And I use the Spyderco Sharpmaker rods to sharpen the blade inside the hollow parts of the serrations. 



TurboScooter said:


> I really like the profile line drawings and the data sheets in your reviews, but may I make a technical suggestion about them?
> 
> JPG is the wrong image format for those; JPG is best suited for photographs. Because those images only contain text and line drawings, you should get a much better quality image saving as GIF or PNG. The text will be much more crisp, and you won't get the mosquito noise compression artifacts.



Thanks TurboScooter, good point! On my blog this is far less obvious, since the pictures are smaller, but Ill keep it in mind for my next reviews.



El Pescador said:


> Great right up. I ended up owning both a MAC and the Tojiro. I preferred the MAC and the Tojiro ended up in a drawer. Ill need to go back and try to remember why I chose it over the Tojiro.



Maybe because it is bulky and unergonomic? Get it rehandled by Frederiek! 



spoiledbroth said:


> Tojiro used to list it as part of the SD molybdenum vanadium line.



Thanks Spoiledbroth. I suspected something like that. But what is SD? TurboScooter, you provided also a link to an SD line, but I cannot read Japanese  .



daveb said:


> No Gude?



I mentioned Gude in my review, Dave, but I didnt include any pictures. Im happy SousVideLoca did.


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## TurboScooter

All it says in Japanese on that page is "molybdenum vanadium steel". As far as I can tell, they don't specify beyond that.


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## no_one_just_Roy

mark76 said:


> But what is SD?


You can find the official answer on the Japanese Tojiro faq page (in Japanese, of course) http://tojiro.net/jp/support/faq.html
According to the answer, SD stands for "Super Durability" so there is not much meaning behind it 
By the way, DP is "Decarburization Prevention (Method)" which is a Japanese patent in 1972 by Takefu Special Steel Co.,Ltd..


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## joyless

That handle looks amazing!


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## supersayan3

Very nice review, amazing graphics, very nice the photos of different serrations,

Thank you!


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## Keith Sinclair

Nice handle, board and bread


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## Asteger

El Pescador said:


> I ended up owning both a MAC and the Tojiro. I preferred the MAC and the Tojiro ended up in a drawer. Ill need to go back and try to remember why I chose it over the Tojiro.



I've never paid much attention to bread knives, but this thread helps me think about them more and I recall both these names being mentioned in a good way before. Would be interested in hearing recollections about the MAC vs the Tojiro.


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## Bill13

I would be curious about the effect the different shapes of the serrations have on the cutting board. Do some damage the board more that others? The scalloped edges look more "gentle" does that translate into less damage?


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## jbart65

The double serrated Wusthof bread knife, in both classic and Ikon flavors, is easily the best bread knife I have ever used. The double serrations grip even the hardest crusts easily and you can slice quite thin.

Not cheap, though, and the longest size is only 9 inches. The double serrations, however, make up for the lack of length for most breads. I don't find that I miss my older 10 or 12-inch bread knives.


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## fujiyama

I love this custom handle. Thanks for the review.

PS jbart65, Wusthof now offers a cheaper version called the "Pro Super Slicer" which is _very_ impressive. 10" length. Someday I'll compare it to my Tojiro.


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## WildBoar

FWIW, the Tojiro ITK met it's match this past week in the form of two super-crusty breads from Mark Furstenberg/ Bread Furst. The rounded points definitely struggled to bite through the thick, strong crusts. I saw Mark carve up a few loaves a week earlier, and his bread knife was pretty massive and had pointy-points a la the above-mentioned Wusthof. His knife was surprisingly light for the blade height and thickness. I did not catch the name of the maker, but the blade was in a Korin blade protector. Also, it was at least a 250.


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## youkinorn

WildBoar said:


> FWIW, the Tojiro ITK met it's match this past week in the form of two super-crusty breads from Mark Furstenberg/ Bread Furst. The rounded points definitely struggled to bite through the thick, strong crusts. I saw Mark carve up a few loaves a week earlier, and his bread knife was pretty massive and had pointy-points a la the above-mentioned Wusthof. His knife was surprisingly light for the blade height and thickness. I did not catch the name of the maker, but the blade was in a Korin blade protector. Also, it was at least a 250.



I've had similar issues with my Mac, on occasion. Have usually been able to get by increasing the angle of attack a little bit to get through the crust.


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## chinacats

WildBoar said:


> FWIW, the Tojiro ITK met it's match this past week in the form of two super-crusty breads from Mark Furstenberg/ Bread Furst. The rounded points definitely struggled to bite through the thick, strong crusts.



I realize they are extremely popular, but the only reason I use the Tojiro is that it doesn't damage my endgrain. For just doing a good job of cutting hard cryusted loaves (about all I cut), my Henckels is a much better cutter, unfortunately it rips my board to shreds.


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## WildBoar

The Tojiro ITK has slayed many a loaf of crusty bread over the last ~4 years. My wife regularly bakes some rustic loaves. But Mr. Fustenberg is particularly famous for heavily, uh, caramelizing the crusts on his breads :lol2: The truly hard portion of the crusts was about 1/4 inch thick. Definitely a job for cheap German pointy bread knives. Up until this point the Tojiro had never let us down. Since these loaves are now available at our local Whole Foods (i.e., Mecca for my wife), they will be in the house on a regular bases. My old Wusthof bread knife is only around 200 or 225 mm. Will have to pick up a longer pointy bread knife sooner rather then later.


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## chinacats

WildBoar said:


> The Tojiro ITK has slayed many a loaf of crusty bread over the last ~4 years. My wife regularly bakes some rustic loaves. But Mr. Fustenberg is particularly famous for heavily, uh, caramelizing the crusts on his breads :lol2: The truly hard portion of the crusts was about 1/4 inch thick. Definitely a job for cheap German pointy bread knives. Up until this point the Tojiro had never let us down. Since these loaves are now available at our local Whole Foods (i.e., Mecca for my wife), they will be in the house on a regular bases. My old Wusthof bread knife is only around 200 or 225 mm. Will have to pick up a longer pointy bread knife sooner rather then later.



Sounds like a Gude excuse to me!


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