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Improve your charcuterie board game and up your entertaining abilities with these top-tested tools. Over The Sink Cutting Board
A well-prepared charcuterie board is always exciting. Filled with a variety of soft and hard cheeses, plus a gorgeous spread of accouterments like crackers, crostini, and sweet and savory jams, it can easily be a standalone meal, or a platter for noshing before the main course. However, cutting the cheese isn't quite so simple. There's a world of cheese tools and cheese knives out there, in a range of unusual shapes and specialized sizes.
To demystify the process of finding the best cheese knives, we tapped an expert: Eric Brazel, former in-house fromager at Fig Restaurant in Santa Monica, California. He gave us a breakdown of the best cheese knives to use for different types of cheese and why. We also tested nearly a dozen different cheese knives from brands including Boska, Henckels, and Wüsthof, slicing up everything from Brie and cheddar to manchego.
With a classic cheese-knife design, this versatile tool can also prep fruits and veggies.
The handle is longer than necessary, giving you less precise control.
Large holes or hollows in the blade are quite common in cheese knives. "The air pockets help eliminate sticking and make a clean cut without damaging the shape of the cheese," Brazel explains. We were especially impressed with the Prodyne's performance with Brie in our tests; it sliced through the rind and interior without squashing the delicate cheese, even when we cut off tiny wedges.
This knife shape is also good for semi-hard cheeses like gouda or cheddar. The pointy tines on the end are meant to spear items so you can pick them up and move them around the board, whether that's whole blocks or individual cubes.
We didn't see any sticking with any kind of cheese in our testing of the Prodyne, and its sharp, slightly serrated blade also glided right through avocados, tomatoes, and other delicate fruits and vegetables. It's a versatile non-cheese prep tool, if not quite as all-purpose as a longer, heavier-bladed chef's knife. And it's a little unbelievable how cheap it's priced: It outperformed another cheese knife that costs nearly 10 times as much. Our only complaint is that the handle is longer than seems necessary for the 5.5-inch blade, taking away from your level of precise control.
Blade Material: Stainless steel | Handle Material: Bakelite | Blade Length: 5.5 inches | Total Length: 10 inches
Food & Wine / Amanda McDonald
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
This set gives you four tools and a cutting/serving board for a budget-friendly price.
One of the knives is more useful than the rest, and the board is very small.
The best piece of Henckels' cheese set is the heart-shaped knife. Its pointy tip can chisel into a whole wheel of Parmigiano-Reggiano (or any large piece of any hard cheese); its blade can slice semi-firm cheeses, and its rounded side can spread soft ones. The bell-shaped knife (we say it looks a little like a paint scraper) is best for slicing softer and blue cheeses, while the rectangular one is sharp on both one long side and one short side to cut different-sized pieces of harder cheese.
The included two-pronged serving fork is not as useful. It doesn't have a blade and can't be used for slicing, so it's only a serving tool, though it'll work with cheese, charcuterie, fruits, or vegetables. The wooden cutting board is also nice for prep, albeit a little too small to make a good serving tray. Regardless, the price is great for this multi-piece knife set, especially considering that it often goes on sale for a significant discount.
Blade Material: Stainless steel | Handle Material: Wood | Includes: Heart-shaped knife, bell-shaped knife, rectangular knife, two-pronged fork, cutting board
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
This sharp and weighty knife can make paper-thin slices of manchego and Parmesan.
It doesn't work well on soft cheeses and is a bit pricy.
It looks like a baby meat cleaver, but this knife's weighty blade is made for slicing hard cheeses. "You need a sharp, wide blade to easily cut into a hard cheese," Brazel says. "This knife is great to use when cutting Asiago, manchego, and Parmesan." The Monaco+ is sharp enough to make paper-thin slices that won't crumble and fall apart, ideal for that picture-perfect cheese board. It's also great to make nice large, curly chocolate shavings for topping a chocolate cake or even garnishing a chocolate Negroni.
As a hard cheese–specific knife, however, this isn't going to work on your chèvres and Camemberts. It smashed and crumbled soft cheeses in testing. It's not expensive in the general world of knives, but it costs more than some similar models out there. On the other hand, you get to tell people you own a cheese hatchet.
Blade Material: Stainless steel | Handle Material: Stainless steel | Blade Length: 3.41 inches | Total Length: 8.8 inches
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
This inexpensive knife lived up to its name, slicing right through Brie with ease.
Its unusual shape can make it challenging to store safely.
This is one of the stranger-looking knives you'll come across, but its shape serves a purpose. The scalpel-like blade is sharp enough to slide through rinds but narrow enough to give the cheese less surface area to stick to. The blade is offset from the handle so you don't accidentally stick a knuckle into your cheese, while the handle's length gives the whole thing a nice balance.
Given the sticky nature of the goat cheese and Brie we used in testing, we were also impressed with how easily this knife wiped clean. Boksa even says it'll hold up to repeated trips through the dishwasher without losing its edge. We love the unusual look of this blade sitting atop a charcuterie board, though the odd shape makes it tough to store safely in a drawer.
Blade Material: Stainless steel | Handle Material: Stainless steel | Blade Length: 4.21 inches | Total Length: 9.06 inches
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
This knife can spread and slice, thanks to its serrated edge.
It's not sharp enough for hard cheeses, and it's fairly expensive.
This spreader led our soft cheese tests, perfectly cutting Brie and goat cheese, and spreading them on crackers. It also has a serrated edge on one side that can cut through semi-firm cheese, though it wasn't sharp or substantial enough to handle Parmesan in testing.
A spreader can spread more than just cheese, of course: You can also use this tool to apply mayo, mustard, pesto, and more when building a sandwich. Wüsthof is a knife brand we love and trust — it makes our top-rated knife block set and boning knife, among others — but it is rather expensive in general. Considering that a spreader is just one of several knives you'll need to put together a proper cheese board, this one's a bit costly.
Blade Material: Stainless steel | Handle Material: Plastic | Blade Length: 5 inches | Total Length: 9.3 inches
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
These four durable, well-built knives can handle just about any cheese-related task.
The expensive set is for serious queso connoisseurs only.
This high-quality set essentially gives you one cheese knife in each of the major types. There's an all-purpose slicer with nonstick holes in the blade and forked teeth on the end for grabbing; a mini-cleaver for hacking through hard cheeses; a slicer/serving fork for medium cheeses; and a serrated spreader for soft cheeses.
In testing, these knives cut the cheese with ease, and they felt nice doing so. The blades are sharp, the elongated-oval-shaped handles are smooth and comfortable, and the weight is well-balanced. It's a versatile set that can handle any kind of cheese (or cured meat, for that matter). Our main objection is the high cost: You can get individual cheese knives in each of these styles for quite a bit less than the Dalstrong set. The two forked knives also serve pretty much the same purpose, so it's more like a three-knife set for its price.
Blade Material: Carbon steel | Handle Material: Garolite | Blade Lengths: 3.75 inches | Includes: Forked cheese knife, soft cheese knife, mini-cleaver, serrated spreader
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
The super-sharp blade sliced consistent thin sheets of hard and semi-soft cheeses.
It can create only small, thin slices that aren't adjustable in any way.
With a classic cheese-knife design, this tool works something like a vegetable peeler or the slicing side of a box grater. As you drag its blade across the surface of a hard or semi-hard cheese, it makes paper-thin curls that practically melt in your mouth. We were surprised at how sharp this knife is, especially with its budget price. It glided right through Parmesan and semi-firm Drunken Goat cheese, and it's also a multi-tasker you can use to create citrus twists and to peel or slice ingredients like ginger, carrot, potato, cucumber, and more.
Where you're limited with this knife is in the shape of what you cut. The blade is less than 3 inches wide, and the thickness isn't adjustable. "Long, thin slice" is the only option here. (The shovel-shaped portion of the knife isn't sharp around the edges and is intended for serving, not cutting.)
Material: Stainless steel | Dimensions: 8.66 x 2.91 x 0.79 inches
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
Food and Wine / Amanda McDonald
This elegant wire slicer makes short work of sticky, crumbly, buttery cheeses, along with soft butter.
It's quite expensive for an awfully specialized tool.
"A cheese wire is perfect for blue cheeses because it will not drag through or break off the fragile blue cheese," Brazel says. "It will make nice little slices." Cheeses like Roquefort and Gorgonzola combine textures, mixing soft-and-sticky sections with dry, crumbly areas around the veins of mold. Unlike a knife, a wire cutter has almost no surface area for cheese to stick to, and its narrow profile cuts cleanly through soft ingredients. In addition to blue cheese, this style cutter is also good for slicing off pats of butter. And after you're done slicing, it's dishwasher-safe.
Dutch brand Boska specializes in cheese knives and is one of Brazel's favorites (and ours too, as you can see from this list). Most of its tools are very affordable, but this is among Boska's most expensive cheese knives, and its functionality is quite limited. If you're a blue-cheese fan, though, we say go for it — and go for the larger size, which is 50 percent wider for only five bucks more.
Material: Stainless steel | Dimensions: 9 x 11 x 1 inches
We loved the Prodyne CK-300 Multi-Use Cheese Knife because it’s versatile, durable, and easy to use. For a full set of diverse cheese tools at an excellent price, we recommend the Henckels 5-Piece Cheese Set, which includes a semi-heart-shaped knife, a rectangular-shaped knife, a two-pronged fork, and a small cutting board that can be easily transported.
We tested a total of 11 cheese knives and knife sets for this roundup, rating them on design and aesthetics as well as performance in a series of tests.
Many of the knives we tested are specialized for one type or texture, but we at least attempted to use each one in all three cheese tests. (This wasn't feasible in all cases, though. A wire cutter can't get through Parmesan and isn't supposed to.)
After completing all of our other tests, we revealed and compared the retail prices of the knives to consider value. The tested items ranged in price from $10 to $140, though that represents a range of different knife types, as well as single knives and sets.
There is an astounding array of different cheese knives out there, but they fall into a few general categories:
Almost any cheese knife will be made of some kind of steel. Stainless steel is very common, as it's easy to clean and resists corrosion. Carbon steel can hold a sharper edge, but it's more expensive and stainless can cut even very hard cheeses.
Cheese knife handles have a bit more diversity in materials. Different types of wood, plastic, and composite materials have their advantages and disadvantages in terms of both comfort and cleaning. Some cheese knives are single pieces, with the handle made of the same steel as the blade. These don't have any joints or crevices where food can get stuck but are also prone to be slippery when wet.
When switching from one type of cheese to another, you don't necessarily have to give your knife a full wash-and-dry. Brazel suggests just a quick wipe with a damp cloth to clean any residue off the blade. When you're done, use a sponge and dish soap, and wipe the blade dry so it doesn't rust. Some knife brands claim to be dishwasher-safe, but Brazel is skeptical. "You should always hand-wash your knives!" he says. A dishwasher dulls blades faster than hand-washing.
Of course you do! Cheese knives need sharpening just as much as any other knives. "The knives should be honed regularly at home and taken to a professional sharpener once a year," Brazel says. "It is important that they remain very sharp to avoid tugging and pulling apart the cheese." You can use a home knife sharpener on some cheese knives, but many are too small or have an unusual shape.
A good estimate is to plan for one ounce of each cheese per person. Choose three or four cheeses for light appetizer portions, and five or six cheeses for a more substantial feast. It's always a good idea to buy a few extra ounces of each cheese, too, to make sure every guest gets to taste them all. And then make sure you have the right cheese tools you need for the spread.
Global Cheese Knife (Sur La Table)
This knife looks beautiful and feels great to hold. It's ultra-sharp and performed beautifully in our cutting tests. But it didn't perform any better than the similar Prodyne model above, and it costs several times more. Brie also got stuck to some of its thin surfaces and was difficult to clean off while avoiding the blade.
W&P 7-Inch Cheese Knife (Amazon)
This cleaver-style hard cheese knife has a similar design to the Boska hatchet above, similarly glided through hard and semi-hard cheeses in testing, and costs roughly the same amount. It's pretty much a tossup between the two, but we prefer the look of the Boska.
Food Storage Bags Our tests also included the Laguiole Berlingot Cheese Knife Set and Williams Sonoma Open Kitchen Cheese Knife, which are no longer available.