Chef's Knife

• If you do any serious cooking, you need a chef's knife in your cutlery collection. Blades range in length from 4 to 14 inches, and professional chefs call them French knives. You can slice, chop, dice and mince almost any kind of food with this knife and cut up big pieces of meat and bone them without a speciality knife. If you need to smash some garlic, turn that heavy blade on its side and get to whacking. New cooks often feel most comfortable starting with a small blade and working their way up.
  
  

Paring Knife

• Choosing one of three most useful knives helps cooks greatly.knife image by dethchimo from Fotolia.com
  
  The tiniest in the kitchen, the paring knife also works wonders. At just under 4 inches long and less than an inch wide, this little knife peels produce, trims meats and vegetables and gets into little spots where a big knife could never go, like inside the core of a tomato. When you need to get precise and perform a small job tidily, the paring knife becomes your new best friend in the kitchen. The design reduces tension in the cook's hand while getting the most out of the blade surface.
  
  

Bread Knife

• The name says it all: You need this knife to properly slice through bread or any type of roll, baguette or bagel with a crust. Bread knives offer a long, serrated blade that handles the job like no other knife. The most useful ones measure at least 9 inches, so you can tackle your largest ciabatta or Italian loaf. Far from a one-task utensil, however, serrated bread knives also make neat, short work of cutting a cake or slicing a juicy tomato.
  
  

Tips

• Always use the right size knife for a job even if it means taking time to get used to cutting with a big chef's or bread knife. Once you get the hang of it, the three basic knives will cut down on the number of knives you need to buy and store, and you will see how much more efficient your cooking becomes. Using a small knife for a big knife's job will make your hand sore and tired and take much longer to finish the work. Buy the highest quality knife you can afford, and keep it sharpened to make it efficient and safe.