Yoshida Santoku Funayuki SUJ-2 Kuro-uchi 155mm (6.1″) [Magnolia]

Santoku Funayuki is a jack-of-all-trades in the kitchen and will excel at all types of chopping and slicing on the kitchen board; you might find it a touch short only for very large chunks of meat.

BLADE SHAPE:
Compared to the basic Santoku knife shape, the spine of funayuki’s blade tapers towards the tip, creating a slight curve between the tip and the midsection. The standard shape of a santoku knife featuring a straight edge with a narrow sheep’s foot blade thus transforms into a blade that looks like a deba but is better suited to precision cutting, where you need really thin cuts (this makes it unsuitable for cutting through bones or making more robust cuts). As opposed to a forward and backward motion slicing technique that is characteristic of santoku knives, the curved belly requires a rocking back and forth motion. A pronounced tip and triangle design are perfect for cutting smaller pieces of meat and for filleting fish. 

The word funayuki means “the boat (ocean) goes” and the knife was originally used on fishing boats, primarily as a lightweight fillet knife to test the quality of the catch, as well as to prepare meals at sea and perform a range of cleaning and prep jobs.

In short: funayuki blade is a superb hybrid between various traditional shapes of Japanese knives, such as gyuto, santoku and deba, which makes it a versatile, all-around knife for various tasks in the kitchen.

STEEL:
Yoshida Kuro-uchi series knives are traditional Japanese rustic knives. Its price is very affordable for the quality of a hand-forged knife. It is suitable for the first purchase of a traditional Japanese knife. The blade is forged in SUJ-2 steel, which offers incredible capacities, hardness is 63-64 HRC, and at the same time the knife is very easy to resharpen. The blade needs some extra care. After the use rinse it well and dry it.

BLADE FINISH:
The name of kuro-uchi refers to the final look of the blade, which is unprocessed on the top and has already developed dark patina, which protects the blade.

HANDLE:
The handle is made of magnolia wood with a plastic ferrule. 

ABOUT THE BLACKSMITH:
The knife is manufactured at the smithy of Yoshida Hamono in Japan, a family company with an age-long tradition in manufacturing state-of-the-art tools and Japanese swords, i.e. katanas, by hand. Yoshida Hamono has a great deal of experience forging ZDP-189 steel in the traditional manner.