I put up a video of me cutting a loaf of bread and the comments turned into a war. Half of them told me I was ruining a good knife. So I went and found out whether they were right.

It Started As A Show-Off Object

In Victorian Britain bread was most of dinner for most people, and it arrived whole to be cut at the table. So the bread knife became its own thing.

There's one sitting in a museum collection in Massachusetts, made by Joseph Rodgers & Sons of Sheffield, with a handle moulded into the shape of an ear of corn.

The design came from a bloke called Henry Cole, who went on to run what's now the V&A and who invented the commercial Christmas card. In 1847 he set up a venture to get proper design into ordinary household objects. It went broke in four years.

And here's the bit that surprised me. That knife has a smooth blade. Serrated bread knives didn't come into widespread use until late in the 1800s. For most of the Victorian era a bread knife was a bread knife because of its length and the ceremony of it. Not because of teeth.

Then A Machine Made It Pointless

Otto Rohwedder owned three jewellery shops in St Joseph, Missouri. He sold all three to fund a machine that could slice a whole loaf at once.

In 1917 a fire took his prototype and his blueprints with it. He raised the money again and started over. The first machine-sliced loaf went on sale on the 7th of July 1928.

Wonder Bread went sliced in 1930. By 1933 American bakeries were making more sliced bread than unsliced, and the bread knife stopped mattering in the average house.

The serrations actually got good because of those machines. Güde in Solingen reckon Franz Güde developed the serration for bread slicing machines in 1931, then the pointed-tooth version for knives in 1941. Factory problem first, kitchen second.

Then everyone started buying proper bakery loaves with hard crusts, and half the country started baking their own in lockdown. The bread knife got made redundant by a machine and then rescued by sourdough.

So Does Bread Actually Blunt Your Knife

A bit, yes. Crust is abrasive and every pass takes microscopic bits of steel off the edge. Hard crust does it faster than soft.

Anyone telling you bread has zero effect on your knife is wrong, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise just because it suits me.

But it's rarely the main thing killing your edge.

Your Chopping Board Is Doing More Damage

Glass boards are the worst thing you can own. Glass is nearly as hard as knife steel and it doesn't give at all, so every cut grinds the edge instead of letting it sink in. Stone does the same. Bamboo is harder than most people realise.

If your knife has gone blunt and you're blaming the sourdough, have a look at what you're cutting on first. I'd put money on the board.

Most Of The Time It Isn't Even Blunt

The edge on a sharp knife is thin enough to fold over sideways under pressure. It hasn't worn away. It's bent.

That's why a knife can feel dead one minute and sharp again after thirty seconds on a honing rod, which just pushes the edge back into line. Actual steel loss is much slower, and that's what sharpening is for.

Hone yours regularly and the wear from cutting bread disappears into something you're doing anyway.

So cutting bread with a good knife and looking after it afterwards is completely fine. The people acting like I'd taken a chisel to a Ferrari were overstating it.

Where They've Got A Point

My girlfriend bakes sourdough. Proper hard crackly crust.

A straight blade on a loaf like that doesn't bite in, it skates across the top. So you lean on it. And then the whole loaf compresses under the weight and you end up with a flat slice and a wrecked crumb.

That's not me blunting my knife. That's me using the wrong shape of knife and getting a worse bit of bread out of it.

Serrations fix it because the teeth concentrate the force onto points and saw through instead of pressing down. Which is the entire reason the thing exists.

What I'd Actually Tell You To Do

Soft loaf, sandwich bread, fresh white, a bun. Use your chef's knife. Cut it, hone it, get on with your day. You're not doing any harm.

Hard crust, sourdough, a proper bakery loaf with a shell on it. A serrated edge will cut it better, and you'll get a nicer slice of bread. Not because your good knife is too precious to touch it, but because it's the wrong shape for that one job.

And either way, get off the glass board.

So We Made One

I'm not going to tell you that you need a bread knife for a sandwich loaf, because you don't. But for the sourdough, yeah.

Mary's ours. Carbon steel like the rest of the range, hardened to 58, serrated single bevel so it parts a loaf instead of dragging through it. 250mm blade, hand-shaped Padauk handle, and the same black kurouchi finish that comes off the forge rather than out of a spray gun.

She's built for exactly the loaf I've been going on about.

Here she is →