Taste Lab
Yuri Santoku Japanese Kitchen Knife
The Yuri Knife collection from Shinzu Hamono features knives crafted with a three-layer steel construction, known for their thin blades. This layering adds durability, while the stainless steel provides resistance against corrosion.
What is a Santoku knife?
The Santoku knife, which means 'three virtues' in Japanese, is a popular multi-purpose kitchen tool. These three virtues refer to its ability to handle chopping, slicing, and dicing tasks, as well as its versatility in cutting various ingredients like fish, meat, and vegetables.
What is the Santoku best for?
Just like its name suggests, the Santoku knife is perfect for chopping, dicing, and mincing all sorts of foods like meat, fish, and veggies. With its sharp, slim blade and straight edge, you can make quick, clean cuts using an up-and-down motion, a tap-chop, or a push-cut.
The Santoku's tall, flat shape and its thin, sharp blade make it great for easily slicing up thin pieces of meat, seafood, cheese, fruits, and vegetables. Plus, its wide blade comes in handy for scooping food off the cutting board.
- 3-layer stainless steel blade
- Wooden handle
- Total length 310mm
- Blade length 190mm
- Weight 90g
- Each knife comes in its own wooden case
- Made in Japan

Yuri Santoku Japanese Kitchen Knife
FAQ
Questions and Answers
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We make small-batch, artisanal, and high-quality sauces using traditional techniques and high-quality ingredients. The focus is on creating unique and flavourful products with a high attention to detail and care, rather than mass-produced, commercially made sauces.
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We sure do, contact us for details at wholesale@tastelab.co.nz
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There are no animal products in the fermented hot sauces. Our Sweet Chilli Sauce contains fish sauce. Our Hot Honey Sauces contain honey... so it depends how you feel about that.
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Yes! And No.
Most of the sauces are gluten free. The exceptions are Reaper Madness which is made with some malt vinegar and the BBQ sauce which is made with Worcestershire sauce which contains gluten.
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No, none of our Sauces or Spice Blends contain MSG, artificial flavours, or preservatives.
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The Scoville scale is based on a subjective test in which a panel of tasters, typically five, taste a sample of dried pepper that has been mixed with sugar water in decreasing concentrations until the heat can no longer be detected. The heat level of the pepper is then rated based on the number of times the sample must be diluted before the tasters can no longer detect its heat.
The rating is based on the Scoville Heat Units (SHU) and ranges from 0 for a bell pepper to over 2 million for the hottest peppers in the world, such as the Carolina Reaper. The scale is not linear, so a pepper with a rating of 1 million SHU is not just twice as hot as a pepper with a rating of 500,000 SHU.
Today, more objective methods such as High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) are used to measure the concentration of capsaicin, the compound responsible for the spiciness of peppers, but the Scoville scale remains a popular way to compare the heat levels of different peppers and spicy foods.
We're currently working on measuring the HPLC for our sauces.