Why We Love the Mercer Millennia Wide 10-inch Bread Knife
The Mercer has a generously sized blade that can cut a round loaf in half with just a few strokes (though the blade is actually 9.5 inches long, not the 10 advertised). Its traditional pointed teeth dig eagerly into tough crusts — instead of slipping, like my Tojiro did — making for much safer slicing. Its chubby, rubbery handle provides a tactile, comfortable grip — and it fits my big paw and my wife’s smaller hand equally well.
Most people probably won’t buy the Mercer for its looks, though you can get it with a number of accent-colored handles to jazz things up a bit.
But who cares how it looks? The Mercer bread knife is a tool designed to do one job, and it does that job exceptionally well. Check out the photo below: That’s a clean slice through a 2-pound, 9-inch round loaf in three strokes, without crushing the crumb at all and leaving a neat edge on the crust. That means I can lay the cut side down on the cutting board and the loaf will stay fresh for at least three days.
I liked my Mercer so much that I bought another one for my dad. He’d gotten himself a pretty decent kitchen-knife set from Henckels. But, like most knife sets, his set came with an abominable bread knife. It was one of those tiddly, all-too-familiar 8-inch disasters that are too short to do any real slicing and too dull to give even Wonderbread a scare. I hated it beyond words.
I bake when I visit him, and it’s great to finally have a good knife on hand after years of frustration. My big brother also does the sourdough thing, and after using the Mercer at Dad’s, he bought one for himself, too. He’s a surgeon, so I figure if it meets his standards, it’ll meet just about everyone’s.
