* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st6LggwoL_4
* https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/8204-three-esse...
* Under USD 75: https://archive.is/https://www.americastestkitchen.com/equip...
For most daily needs: chef's knife, pairing knife, serated/bread knife. Possibly useful 'extras': kitchen shears, petty/utility, boning, slicing/carving. They do not recommend sets.
More important is learning proper knife skills, including maintenance and sharpening. Even the best knives need to be taken care of.
I really enjoy markets like they describe and I've experienced them in Asia, but I have no idea where I'd find one in WA State.
Somewhat similar to the book of the Blue Bottle founder on coffee and his company path. Both are basically, as the GP remarked, are glimpses into other people's passion and deep fascination with a certain subject. Fantastic reads IMO.
* In fact, let me add two more books - Ivan Ramen and Tartine Bread. Similar introductions into lives of people and their obsessions with a specific subject.
https://www.amazon.com/Sharp-Definitive-Introduction-Sharpen...
https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Bottle-Craft-Coffee-Roasting/dp/...
https://www.amazon.com/Ivan-Ramen-Obsession-Recipes-Unlikely...
https://www.amazon.com/Tartine-Bread-Chad-Robertson/dp/08118...
If anyone knows other books of the same nature, I'm all ears.
So much so, that I went out of my way to get the longer chef knife/gyuto version of it off eBay last year! It's freaking fantastic! They're both well maintained now, honed often and my two go-to knives over a wusthof and bunch of Misen knives
I tried a bunch of kitchen sheers. They lacked leverage. These cut bones with ease.
OP's writing is nice, but he is de facto a scalper looking for the maximum amount of arbitrage. There's enough of them, like mentioned in the article, that they'll pick any flea market or secondhand store clean off diamonds in the rough before you as a regular guy really get a chance to find any.
What they're doing isn't illegal or forbidden, but it has completely destroyed the spirit of flea markets and secondhand stores as quaint places. And in response to becoming as hypercapitalist as the rest of society, a large contingent of people on flea markets has started to offer whole tables stuffed with cheap AliExpress / Temu crap. Or AI art being sold as "handmade".
The enthusiast offering artisanal coffee or lemonade or cinnamon rolls from his stall or food truck has quadrupled his prices, because if everyone else is gouging the visitor, why shouldn't he?
The same goes for secondhand clothing stores. They're wise to the scalpers looking to flip stuff on Vinted or whatever, so they have also doubled or even tripled their prices. It's an open secret that a lot of stores let the girls working there have a first lookover of whatever comes in.
My conclusion is that very few normies care about edge quality and most of those that do are making some sort of hobby out of it and want to buy something excessively fancy. See also Japanese knives; I'm sure they're very nice but two minutes with a whetstone will get any shitty piece of metal sharp enough to cut some chicken. There's no reason to overthink this stuff.
If there's a local community college or trade school with a culinary program, they might sell stuff like this or at least be able to direct you to suppliers.
https://www.amazon.com/Accurate-Whetstone-Sharpener-Effortle...
Normies DO care about edge quality but they DON'T care about fiddling with fancy "whetstones" and "diamond sharpeners" and such. Sharpen it, clean with soap and water, dry and burn it (to remove the rabies and typhus) and wipe it down with olive oil, mmmmm!
Elaborate? You heat your knives after every sharpening?
https://www.tsprof.eu wants a word
There are many quality whetstones to choose from and a lot of debate on the absolute best. But TLDR, KING is generally highly rated:
