Why is a Tomato Knife Forked? (explained)

If you have no idea what a forked knife is or have been using simple knives to cut your tomatoes, we are concerned about the mess you must have been making in your kitchen.

Well, even if you try to cut a tomato from a sharp straight-edge blade knife, there will still be a lot of mess (from a lot, we surely mean the amount of mess that is enough to spoil your mood).

Tomatoes have hard skin and a juicy soft flesh underneath. These are a precious and of course expensive fruit. These are not only a part of our daily healthy cooking but we also love to eat it in our uncooked healthy foods like salads too. It is also part of our favorite burgers and pizzas.

If we define a perfect tomato, it might not have a little thin outer layer but neither you get a perfect tomato skin each day nor is a soft skin going to make its cutting any easier. Even the idea of cutting a tomato from a dull knife should make you shudder.

One wrong step and you are deep in those cute seeds spreading on your cutting board and ready to tell you that you did a bad job. Tomato is a possessive and delicate pick.

It needs to be dealt with care in cutting and cooking as both can be spoiled if not handled with much precision. That is also why tomato cutting is considered as a chef’s test of his/ her knife skills. How will you even pass this test if you are already not equipped with essential apparatus (yes, we are talking about the forked knife, which we will define later).

Applying pressure or using an ultra-sharp knife to do the cutting job really fast will do you no good because it really is not about applying right pressure or having really sharp blade but it is about the technique that the complex (hard and juicy) tomato requires to be handled with. We do not suggest a chef’s knife for this delicate creation, as it has its very own knife demands.

Can any regular knife slice Tomatoes?

Well, tomatoes can be sliced with a regular knife, but the chances of failure are just higher unless you have years and years of experience to bet on.

First of all, when there is an easy option to do the job without messing up (through tomato knife), why go for any other simple knife. Still, if you want to use an ordinary kitchen knife to deal with tomato, you are making a simple task tough without any reason.

An ordinary kitchen knife might not have a sharp blade, so it will fail at a very starting step as it will require applying pressure on tomato skin, which is the same as putting pressure on water balloon and hoping to get thin sliced water.

Let’s suppose you have an ultra-sharp knife which will make applying pressure a little less required but there will still be a requirement of it and even after you clear the first step of dealing with skin without messing it up, how will you make sure that the full of flavor juice of water will be distributed in all of its slices?

It might look like having dozens of big sharp knives complete your kitchen, but this is merely an aesthetic demand as you will need many different knives with different sizes and shapes of blades to complete your kitchen.

Take a forked knife as an example or invest in some nice quality paring or chef’s knife for slicing different kitchen needs. For a tomato you surely need a forked knife.

Forked Knives:

A forked knife is a small-sized kitchen knife with little fork-like teeth on its blade edge.

These teeth are what makes the lifting easy while there will be no slipping from the thin skin of tomato and a very fine and quick cut will be obtained by squishing the tomato after slipping off the cut neatly and the best thing is that, there will not be any added amount of pressure.

A forked tomato knife is a serrated knife typically shorter (15 to 21 cm long) than a bread knife. It usually has a sharp fork like pointing end followed by serrations to evenly cut through hard skin of tomato and it’s full of water inner flesh.

Such serrations are engineered and make the slicing or cutting of tomato look like you are sliding through the butter. So there is no damaging or bruising to the delicate flesh of even the perfectly ripe juicy tomato.

This is just a matter of one trial and you are never going back from cutting tomatoes with forked knife. Of course there’s no going back from evenly sliced tomatoes.

Forked knife allows the tomato to get sliced even when it is not sharp. The reason behind is that forked edge does most of its work and there’s a very little amount of cutting left to do.

Such knives work delicately on the tomatoes and cut this slippery and juicy fruit by having an across-the-surface cutting motion instead of a down motion followed by pressure.

The best thing about it is that there will be no pressuring out of seeds and evenly sliced thin tomato layers can be obtained without any professionalism needed.

There are also doubly forked knives for allowing left handed and right handed people, both to cut perfectly.

The best thing about such knives is that even when your blade gets dull, these work without compromising the quality of slicing, this is so unlike of chef’s knife and others that require sharpened to work effectively.

Tip of Forked Knife:

Thin and log blade forked knives are used to pierce the tomato skin, giving squishing free, evenly done thin slices. Moderately long blades give you a better approach to cutting while additional benefits involve placing slices of tomato on a plate or the sandwich.

Such knives are also called forked tip utility knives and you can use them as a bar knife to cut squishy fruits or do garnishing.

The usual very own tomato knives (of course we are talking about forked knives) have round about 5 inches long sharp forked blade for mash-free slicing through the flesh and skin of the tomato. The tip of the forked knives lets you move slices to your sandwiches.

It’s tip is in the form of two prongs that behave like kid gloves to lift tomato slices. They allow lifting of tomato flesh (which is now really soft and more delicate) from the cutting board without hurting it.

Why would you ever need a Forked Knife?

This era is all about advancements and innovations done for making our lives easy no matter what we are talking about.

A man eats 3 times a day, and tomato is one of the luxurious yet basic needs of the food cooking process. We spend a lot of time in our kitchen and doing something at least twice a day has essential effect on our mood.

Imagine going to kitchen to make your favorite burger and the bun along with the grilled beef looks as amazing as possible but the salad cutting specially tomato is ruined, how are you going to feel? No very good, we suppose.

Now imagine you have finally obtained a very nicely sliced tomato to place on your sandwich, but while trying to lift it up, it went straight to the floor and now your whole mood is ruined because you don’t have any more tomato or the mood to deal with it.

Sliced tomatoes are not only part of burgers or sandwiches, but these are also used in salad centers and for eating it just the way its slices are (you may squeeze some lemon on it too). Tomato cubes are also used in salsa foundations, good guacamole’s part, egg dishes, salads, frittatas, quiche and diverse options of salads.

You can also use tomatoes in many different ways like making a soup, homemade bruschetta, raw soup, stuffed tomatoes, fried tomatoes, green cooked tomatoes, pickled tomatoes, homemade sauces, dried tomatoes and so much more.

Final thoughts

For these reasons, you will require a knife that will not only give you a perfectly juicy and evenly sliced tomato but the easy lifting and plating is also promised.

So we can surely say that buying a forked knife is not a need for your kitchen requirements and skills but it is also the way of survival for your better, easy and quick type of cooking and plating.

Still, if you think that you can survive without a forked knife then you surely can, until you don’t have to deal with dishes involving perfectly sliced tomatoes.