DaTerra CucinaSantoku Knife - 7 inch | Eisenrose German Steel Professional Kitchen Knives

I'm impressed with everything this company has produced, and this knife is another excellent kitchen tool. Good balance, nice weight, beautiful handle, and so far, sharp as hell. Well worth adding to my collection, and I've been using it daily since it arrived.

Great knife. Perfect weight and blade for our cooking and prepping.Our third knife

Absolutely beautiful knife! You can see it's well made. I personally love how the blade and the handle are all one piece. You'll never have to worry with the handle coming loose on you. This is a knife that will last you a life time if.

I am impressed and like the knife very much.

Seems to be everything it was supposed to be and a nice case

Some might say it’s not fair to compare this knife to the high end cutlery including knives from Wusthof, Shun, Henckels, Global and MAC. My go-to Santoku is a modestly priced version from MAC that doesn’t look as luxurious as this one and costs just slightly more. It has superb balance, sharpens up quickly and is light and ultra-sharp. This rosewood DaTerra Cucina is stunning and perhaps the best looking Santoku I have ever used. It’s also impeccably boxed in velvet and would make a highly desirable gift to all but the most picky cutlery users like me. Out of the box, it is perfectly sharp. On the downside, it’s a bit handle heavy and benefits by “choking” up with the grip straddling the back of the knife and handle. For repeating tasks, for some users, a knife that is not in balance can lead to hand fatigue.Of importance, the manufacturer neglects to tell us in the Amazon listing what angle to sharpen to. As you may know, Japanese style knives are typically sharpened to 15-17 degrees, and knives in the German cutlery tradition are roughly 20 degrees. This is all changing due to the popularity of Asian knives, Santokos in particular. Fortunately ,the product box lists an ideal 15 degree angle. Even revered Wusthof is now making their knives to a sharper angle. My recommendation with this knife is to get an inexpensive honing tool or better yet, a pull through sharpener set to the Japanese standard.To sum up, this knife looks like it could easily be triple the price. At $69 at the time of this review the quality is commendable. It would make a fantastic gift presentation and is a sharp value. As a gift to all but the most serious cooks, it’s worthy of five stars. Out of the box sharpness also rates a five yet balance only a 3.5. One suggestion for the good folks at DaTerra: please consider removing the far too prominent logo on the blade.Lastly, a combination of Amazon’s 30 day return policy and the manufacturer full one year money back guarantee make this sensuous Santoku a risk-free temptation.

I have to be honest, knife reviews are among my favorites to do. Reason being, you never know what you're going to get. Sometimes, it's a great knife, and sometimes not. But it always give me an opportunity to educate consumers about a particular area of knife shopping, and that is the STEEL.A knife review without an in-depth discussion of the steel used is as useful to the reader as a bicycle is useful to a fish. Not very. The steel used tells you 95% of what you, as a user, needs to know about the knife: what you'll need to sharpen it, how often you'll be sharpening it, how resistant it is to corrosion, how resistant it is to abuse...all things which matter most when considering a knife. So lets take a look at the steel used here, and see what it tells us.This knife is made from 1.4116 (or just 4116) stainless steel. It's a low-end high carbon martensitic stainless steel, made by the German company Thyssen- Krupp.A word on martensitic steel, and what it is...Martensitic stainless steel is formed by the creation of martensite. Martensite has been a key element of quenched steel for hundreds of years, but was officially named in the 20th century after the metallurgist Adolf Martens (1850 - 1914).Martensite is a body centered cubic form of crystallized iron which is created when heated austenite is rapidly cooled by quenching. The increased rate at which Martensite crystals are created prevents cementite from being formed, and causes carbon atoms to become unnaturally trapped in crystals which would ordinarily expel excess carbon during gradual cooling.Martensitic stainless steels can be heat treated and hardened, but have reduced chemical resistance when compared to austenitic stainless steels. Martensitic stainless steel is often used when hardness is critical, such is in knives, where surface hardness creates a sharper blade.The chemical composition of 4116 is as follows:0.55 % of Carbon: It improves hardness and wear/corrosion resistance, but a high amount of it decreases strength.15 % of Chromium: For tensile strength and Edge retention and enhances corrosion resistance and wear resistance.1 % of Manganese: Increases hardness and brittleness.1 % of Silicon: Increases strength like Manganese.0.04% of Phosphorus: Increases strength.0.03% of Sulfur: Increases machinability, and decreases strength.0.8% of Molybdenum: Increase Machinability and strength.0.15% of Vanadium: Improves wear resistance and hardenability.So what does this all tell us? Well, it tells us for 1 that our knife will be fairly corrosion resistant, given the high chromium content. It has a moderately high carbon content, but not so high as to make it terribly brittle, so it should stand up to a moderate level of abuse. However, the mid-level carbon content means it has a fairly low Rockwell hardness (around 56, generally) means that it won't hold an edge terribly well, and that you'll be sharpening it fairly often. So if you aren't skilled at sharpening knives, this would be something you would want to avoid. But on the flip side, the relatively low hardness means that sharpening this will be easy peasy, and any method you have should work well, including a plain old Arkansas whet stone. Knives with higher levels of hardness (59-60 and above) can be difficult to sharpen without diamond hones or ceramic rods, so you won't have to purchase special equipment to sharpen these, any gear you have that is capable of sharpening knives should work well on these, if you can match the original angle of the grind.Whew. That's a lot of information about 4116 steel. But to break it all down - corrosion resistant, fairly tough and resistant to abuse, not super hard so will need to be sharpened often, but is pretty easy TO sharpen, so nothing special required. And that's this knife's steel in a nutshell.Then we come down to looks and build. Aesthetically, it's a pretty knife, generally. It includes a mosaic pin in the construction, which is a nice addition. What's odd is the manufacturer doesn't even mention "mosaic pin" in the description, which makes me wonder if they even know what it is, lol. Not having seen it mentioned in any other reviews, I thought it was worth mentioning. Mosaic pins are made by putting different size and material tubes and wires inside a larger tube to make a pattern, which is then typically epoxied together and cut to length. They're purely decorative, and the regular rivets are the ones that do the mechanical work of holding the handle scales to the tang.The grind and workmanship on the blade could be a bit better, as I can easily note the cross-grind across the blade where the dimples were ground out. The final sand/polish on the blade should have removed all the cross-grain sanding marks, at least in a blade that costs more than $50. I do like the thin profile of the blade, it lends itself well to chopping and slicing, but if you need a meat cleaver, I recommend picking up a meat cleaver.The included photos detail the unfinished grind on the blade, as well as a close up detail of the mosaic pin.So, this is a decent knife, but not great. It's fairly comfortable, decently constructed, but a little more work could go into the fit and finish. Also the steel used in the construction should be listed in the product description, as this is the most useful information ABOUT a knife. When knife shopping, steel is always your #1 concern. Being frank, the steel used here is pretty low on the scale of knife steels. It's popular and oft used, but in budget knives mainly. You're paying more for flash than performance here, and it doesn't even totally deliver there. I give it 3 out of 5.