This is not about my Napoleon complex. I really mean it -we little people work better with a bigger knife. Actually, mostly, big people chop more efficiently with a bigger knife too.  Why?

Well, Here are two chef’s knives, side by side, an 8-inch and a 10-inch:

different size chef's knives

The 10-inch knife is heavier.

The heaviest part of any knife is where the blade meets the handle:

The heaviest part of the knife

that is where you should position your “victim,” aka the item you are going to chop. If you put your vegetables or herbs or whatever you are chopping right at that spot the knife will naturally come down heavily on top of the vegetables. You don’t have to force it, the knife does the work for you.

But something else is going on here. The “sweet spot” on a 10 -inch knife is a lot longer than that of a 8-inch knife. The “sweet spot” is the area of the knife blade that you will use to do most of your chopping. Just look at the difference:

The sweet spot on a 10-inch knife

about 5 1/2-inches

versus

The sweet spot on an 8-inch chef's knife

about 4 1/2 inches

Which means that you can chop more of an ingredient using a 10- inch knife than an 8-inch knife

much more work gets done with a 10-inch knife

and work less at the same time because the knife is heavier. Hooray!!!