Equipment Review: The Best Serrated Knives



Serrated knives are great for cutting so much more than bread. Which one is best?

Buy our winning Mercer Bread Knife:
Buy the Mac Knife Superior Bread Knife:
Read our full review:

ABOUT US: Located in Boston’s Seaport District in the historic Innovation and Design Building, America’s Test Kitchen features 15,000 square feet of kitchen space including multiple photography and video studios. It is the home of Cook’s Illustrated magazine and Cook’s Country magazine and is the workday destination for more than 60 test cooks, editors, and cookware specialists. Our mission is to test recipes over and over again until we understand how and why they work and until we arrive at the best version.

If you like us, follow us:

source

Similar Posts

29 Comments

  1. After 2 years of using the mercer, I’d say it’s a no. The handle needs to be way more offset from the board surface. You are going to have to do very awkward things to cut through that bottom strip of crust. It’s such a simple fix. I’ll be buying something else.

  2. The Mercer isn't sharp at all. It skids over the top of sourdough. I can run my finger along the blade, no problem. I don't understand all the Amazon reviews saying how sharp it is and how well it cuts crusty sourdough.

    Can anyone recommend a better bread knife?

  3. My favorite wedding gift was a probably not very expensive Japanese knife set that included a chef's knife and a very decent serrated knife that meets all of your guidelines. That would have been 1996 and they are still as good as ever despite relatively inexpensive construction.

  4. Personally I’ve really taken a liking to the Mercer offset serrated knife I recently got; the offset design just makes it so much easier to saw through stuff.

    I’ll probably have to get it sharpened somewhere down the line lol

  5. Slicing tomatoes is not a test of sharpness. It's a test of blade thickness and taper. A dull knife with a thin taper / edge geometry will still cut. And because tomatoes vary in ripeness and are soft, there is a lot room for errors in testing. Please use industrially standardised tests for sharpness if you really want to access sharpness.

  6. I do love your gear reviews but I have to take exception to your comment simply dismissing knives with the more rounded “scalloped” serrations. I don’t understand this advice 🤷‍♂️. Some of the very best bread knives have these serrations. I agree that the Mercer is a great value however I own the Shun Classic you depict in your video clip “struggling” to break the surface of a hard crusted bread where the user is obviously applying no downward pressure at all and I can assure you that it is not the case with this knife. It excels at cutting this type of bread and won’t leave half the crumbs that the sharper serrations will.

Leave a Reply