Cooking Techniques

Are You Holding Your Knife Wrong? Most Home Cooks Are

I'll never forget the moment I realized I'd been holding a knife incorrectly for fifteen years. I was watching a cooking competition show—one of those high-stakes culinary battles where contestants create restaurant-quality dishes in impossible timeframes—when the camera zoomed in on a chef's hands. Something about the way their fingers curled around the handle, the effortless precision of each cut, looked fundamentally different from my own awkward chopping technique. I paused the show, walked to my kitchen, picked up my chef's knife, and suddenly felt like I'd been trying to write with my non-dominant hand my entire adult life. That night, I fell down a rabbit hole of culinary technique videos, and what I discovered shocked me: the vast majority of home cooks grip their knives in ways that professional chefs would never dream of. We're not just being inefficient—we're actually making cooking harder, slower, and potentially more dangerous than it needs to be.