Imarku Professional 8″ Chef’s Knife Review
Star Rating: 2.9 Stars
Overall Rating: Lower-end Quality Professional Knife
Knife: Imarku 8 inch Chef Knife
Brand: iMarku
Bladesmith: Unknown
Made In: Solingen, Germany
Blade Construction: 7Cr17Mov High-Carbon Stainless steel with .6 – .75 carbon for hardness and 16% – 18% chrome for anti-tarnishing. It appears to be stamped, not forged.
Blade Thickness: 2.2 mm
Rockwell Rating: 58 – 60
Edge: Double-beveled blade with a 15° angle
Handle: Pakkawood with engraved end-cap
Tang: Amazon comments say about a 2/3 tang into the handle
Weight: 8.2 oz (232 g)
Total Length: 13″
NSF Approved?: The construction appears to meet NSF standards but I cannot find an official NSF approval seal
Cleaning: highly recommend hand-washing only. Do not place in dishwasher
Cost: About $49.99 on Amazon.com
Availability: Currently available (Oct 2016)
Warranty: 100% money back guarantee posted on Amazon
Note: This knife was donated for review
Imarku 8″ Chef Knife Review Summary
Star Rating: 2.9 Stars
Overall Rating: Lower-end Professional Knife
Joe Bartlett aka The Knife Nerd helped me do another knife review.
Although the Imarku Chef’s Knife does have a very sharp edge and aesthetic design, we have rated it as a lower-end professional knife. For the home cook this may be an excellent addition to your kitchen knife set. It’s light, mostly comfortable, and pretty. But for the professional cook who spends hours every day using their chef’s knife, this one would be cumbersome and frustrating because it cannot handle thicker, denser products like onions, shallots, and carrots.
Additionally, we do find it a little disconcerting that there are so many misspellings and punctuation errors on their Amazon page selling this knife.
Imarku 8 inch Chef’s Knife Video Review
| Imarku 8″ Chef’s Knife Review | |||
| Possible | Actual Rating | Test | Notes |
| Sharpness | |||
| 5 | 1 | Carrot-Lengthwise Test | Major struggle cutting the carrot lengthwise. |
| 5 | 2 | Shallot Test | Struggled on the horizontal cuts on the shallot. |
| 5 | 2 | Onion Test | Struggled on the horizontal cuts on the onion; had to muscle our way through the cuts. |
| 3 | 2 | Tomato Test | Very smooth with minor effort, but it did take several strokes to make the slice. Nice thin slices. |
| 3 | 3 | Basil Test | Clean, sharp cuts with no bruising, tears, or shredding. |
| 3 | 3 | Paper Test | Did a good job on the paper but not quite as good as some other knives. |
| Comfort | |||
| 5 | 3 | Comfortable Handle | Comfortable handle but the bolster felt a little “sharp” in the sense of biting into the hand, rather than having a smooth comfortable transition from handle to blade. |
| Quality Materials | |||
| 5 | 2 | Steel Quality | The steel on the blade seemed to stain easily during our test. Also, since the edge was clearly sharp, wonder if the steel “clung” to the food making it difficult to cut dense products. |
| 3 | 2 | Durability | The steel on the blade seemed to stain easily during our test. |
| 3 | 3 | Handle Quality | The Pakkawood handle is a quality, durable feature for this knife. |
| Quality Construction/Design | |||
| 4 | 1 | Overall Construction Quality | Although the overall construction is seamless and aesthetically pleasing, the blade itself performs poorly compared to its appearance. |
| 3 | 3 | Design, Engraving, End-cap, etc | This is a beautiful knife with and engraved end-cap and aesthetic appearance. |
| General Ratings | |||
| 5 | 2 | High-end Knife? | 1 = under $25; 2 = $26 – $75; 3 = $76 – $150; 4 = $151 – $300; 5 = $301+ |
| 5 | 2 | Utility | Due to it’s inadequate performance with thick vegetables like onions and hard vegetables like carrots this knife has limited application in the professional kitchen. We had to work extra hard to make the knife perform. But for the home cook this might be an adequate knife. |
| 7 | 2 | Overall Impression | The Imarku is a mixed bag. On the one hand it is very light and comfortable, it does have a very sharp edge, but for whatever reason it struggles on thick and/or dense products. |
| 5 | 1 | Our Star Rating | Although this knife is very sharp you still have to “muscle” your way through dense produce. It requires more work than it should. No idea why such a sharp knife would perform so poorly! |
| Total | |||
| 69 | 34 | 2.9 Stars = Lower-end Quality Professional Knife – See Overall Ranking Below formula: (actual score/total possible*6) |
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Full disclosure: this is an affiliate link and I will receive a commission for each knife purchased. With that said, I stand by the review presented here. Buy This Knife on Amazon
4 stars on Amazon
Imarku Kitchen 8 inch Chef’s Knife
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