What to Look for In a Set of Kitchen Knife Set Look for a set that contains what we consider the three essentials: a chef’s knife, utility knife and serrated bread knife. A chef’s knife is the workhorse you’ll use for chopping onions and celery, slicing tomatoes or eggplant, and mincing garlic and parsley. The curvier its blade, the better it will be at rocking back and forth for tasks like mincing herbs. Although paring knives were once considered must-haves, today we recommend a slightly longer one called a utility knife, which in addition to paring an apple, can be used for slicing small blocks of cheese or segmenting an orange. All good sets will include a long, serrated bread knife. A long thin slicing or carving knife is another good tool to have in your kitchen and we like sets that include one. How We Picked Kitchen Knife Set for you To select our best knife sets, we relied on our years of experience testing knives and using them both in the test kitchen and in our own homes for a wide array of tasks from dicing veggies, to hacking up chickens, to carving roasts. We scoured review sites to see what recommendations were made by other sources and also pored over user comments to find out what home cooks have to say.