Thinking about putting a Cold Steel Bushman Bowie in my knife block

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Peak_Oil

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Nov 6, 2005
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I have a 4" chef's knife which is OK, but not much of a belly. Then a long Japanese slicer that does a great job on steaks, chicken breast (when I don't overcook), a Shun sandwich knife that's great for anything fragile with a thin skin. My steak knives suck, paring knife is kind of meh, bread knife SUCKS, but the big hole in the setup is a chef's knife that's good for butchering a bird. I prefer to buy whole chickens and turkeys, dismember, marinate and grill. It's half the price of buying boneless/skinless or God forbid a bag of frozen tenders.

Nothing I have fits that niche well.

I have a couple CSBB's already that are collecting dust in the garage until the zombie hordes need to be gutted, but I really like that knife. It's got a nice round belly and a nice thin blade, it flexes and takes an edge fast, etc.

It's got no artificial gription, but I don't know that I need it.

Maybe it's time to make a batch of turkey soup this weekend and test drive the idea.

What's the Opinel I need to buy, and which are the paring knives that make the best steak knives for cheap? I know I've seen this mentioned here from time to time, just can't remember which ones. Plastic handle, possibly a laminated blade, sharp as you could want and easy to resharpen with a Sharpmaker... somebody throw me a bone.
 
I have an old CS Bushman from the mid 90's. I forgot what carbon steel they used for it back then. About 3/4" of the tip broke off when I through it to a tree which made it wobble left to right causing it to snap. I grind it down and it now has a useful tip. Anyways, it's my main barbecue knife. It splits ribs at the bone/cartilage and I don't actually notice any chipping since I've had it.
 
Victorinox makes a chef's knife in 12c27 steel. The paring knives sound like Victorinox too.
 
I've been using their western hunter and long hunters and they work very well in the kitchen. Nothing fancy, but the full flat grind is what I like, and the Kruups steel is easy to maintain, and takes a lot of abuse from my family (dishwasher safe). I just picked up a roach belly that should also work well.
 
That long hunter design has been one of my favorites since it was sold in the scalper pattern in carbon V. My friend has one I may try to talk him out of. He uses it in the kitchen.
 
It'll work fine. I've used many of my outdoor fixed blades in the kitchen. A thin sharp blade is what I look for.
 
Well, I tried it out tonight. I work a night shift and got invited to somebody else's house for T-day this year so we're going to do the family thing tomorrow.

I just butchered the bird with a pair of Kitchenaid shears (meh) and cut through the BS with the Cold Steel Bushman. Cleanup was easy, the brining is going well, I'm looking forward to grilling this tomorrow when I wake up and having a nice T-day with my family.

On a side note, I make my own chili sauce, so I have a couple quarts of Serrano/Poblano/Habanero/Chile/Jalapeno/Vinegar sauce that I'm going to water-bath can tonight. I hope that will be a good side dish.
 
Ok, now you've gone from asking a simple question to just being plain ornery. I'm hungry! I want pictures and the recipe!!! :D
 
Whenever I decide to get together a good knife block (I am always using multipurpose knives as kitchen knives), it will include none of those silly kitchen brand knives, or any knives that are designed for kitchen use. Did you know that high end (not the $200 dollar knives, but like the kitchen knives that go into the $80-$90 category) use what would be considered a low quality blade steel in any other knife, yet are perceived as acceptable to use for a kitchen knife? None of that in my house, probably a good damascus chef's knife, and a small knife to be used as a pairing knife will be bought from a respectable knife company.
-Febeleh
2011
 
Well, T-day is over, the bird has done ben et, and I used the Bushman all the way. First things first. The grip on the Bushman is SEVERELY impacted by grease. There is no finger guard on this knife. I would not use this blade again to butcher a bird without doing something to the handle. The grease stuck to it and it slipped in my hand as far as cutting the leg from thigh, so that was that for that. I stuck to a pull slice so I was a little less accident-prone than if I was trying to drive the blade into a joint.

I've heard of people rolling bicycle inner tube over it or wearing a leather glove (which would get ruined by the grease). Frankly, if I had one of those chain mail gloves for my weak hand and a leather glove holding the Bushman with my dominant hand, that would be a really great combo. However, EMT shears do a better job due to the use of leverage, etc. Not to mention that wooden handles just don't seem to have that problem, and whatever handle material they used on my JYDII would be even better. If they had the option of baking that stuff on the handle of this knife it would definitely be a kitchen favorite. Which knives do you use the most? I use my kitchen stuff the most.

For carving the relatively greaseless white meat, I think it would be hard to count the Bushman out. That nice fat belly and carbon steel do a great job of slicing meat... especially brined meat. Long easy strokes and it just came right off in sheets. Rather than sliding around the bones it dug in, which I think might be a chef preference, some might like to slip around for faster carving, some might like to stick to the bones to make the slices more uniform... whatever floats your boat.

Washup was a cinch, though I had to do it by hand and be careful to make sure the grease didn't make the blade coating slip in my hand.

I dunno, it was kind of a wash. For steak or chops I'd be back to the Bushman in a heartbeat. Hell, I'll try it next week with a T-bone and see how it handles. Nowhere near as greasy, no joints to cut through, etc.

For brining a turkey (for that one guy who wanted the recipe) what you do is butcher up the bird raw and thawed into large pieces, put in a big pot, fill with water, and dump salt in. If you use seasoned salt, the seasoning will make its way into the meat. Table salt, it'll just be salty, kosher salt seems to have the least impact on the taste of the meat. The idea is to create a solution around the bird that has more salt than the meat has. This creates kind of an osmotic pressure that drives salt into the bird. Salinity drags water with it. Both water and salt want to move together into a medium that has less salt water than the brining solution has. Did that clear it up? I have a little chemistry under my belt and I think I understand it, but I'm sure somebody out there has a greater understanding of brining.

Part of the key to brining is not to OVERbrine. You want maybe half the turkey to soak up the solution, the middle half none at all. The reason for that is that the turkey cooks from the outside in, so you want the salt to pull water into the outer part of the turkey. That water will partly evaporate, leaving kind of a salty turkey, but one that is uniformly juicy. Take the turkey out, foil it, and let the outside (165) cook the inside to a final temp of 150, which evens the whole bird out. Make sense?

I don't measure ANYTHING when I'm brining a turkey, I just dump seasoning salt in there til I can't see the bottom of the pot and let it soak for a day (24 hours). Anything else you add to the brine will wind up in the turkey as well.

Now you can go ahead and brine your turkey, then roast it or BBQ it or bake it or whatever you want to do with it. You can pack rosemary/thyme butter under the skin and roast at 150 for 24 hours and have a turkey that will absolutely make your grandma do backflips or just throw it on the grill with some sauce, or no sauce, or whatever you want.

One beautiful thing about brining is that the turkey will keep in the fridge longer than an unbrined turkey because the salt is a natural preservative and will keep the meat moist.

http://www.seriouseats.com/2009/11/the-food-lab-turkey-brining-basics.html

Anyway, as it is, I don't think the Bowie Bushman is a do-it-all knife. If you want to use it in the kitchen then think about its strengths and weaknesses, realize it's a $20 knife, and go to town.

My pepper sauce recipes have nothing to do with knives... y'all gonna have to figure it out for yourselves.
 
Sorry not to sound like a smart ass, but the entire image I'm getting of you using a Cold Steel Bushman in the kitchen is comical.
 
Thanks for the cooking tips! I keep forgetting to ask, how did the primary grind work in the kitchen? I always thought it was a little thick for that kind of work, but would be interested to hear your experience. It sounds like it was fine for white meat, did you have any problems with food sticking to the side of the blade?
 
Peak_Oil, Thanks for the review. Glad to hear that the Bushman got pulled from dust-gathering duty in the garage and did okay for your domestic chores.

RE: handle slipperiness. Here are a couple of methods you could try to improve the stability of the grip in hand.

1. Cover the handle with a different material.

Couple of options that come to my mind are to spiral paracord (with an inch or so between wraps) up the handle, soak it with epoxy or super glue to make it impervious to moisture & grease, then cover it with electrical heat-shrink tubing. Or use #8 or #10 solid wire instead of epoxied paracord. The heat shrink will give you a decent grip, though not a great grip, when dry and the protruding bumps from the paracord or wire will provide some corrugations for your fingers to lodge against when it's greasy.

Alternatively, skip the rubbery heat-shrink and simply epoxy in place a tightly-wrapped paracord winding around the outside of the handle.

(edit to add) Couple of other materials for handle wrap that I spotted wandering around the web:
- Plasti-Dip
- spray-on pickup truck bed liner like Rhino, Rustoleum, Dupli-color, etc.

2. Texture the rolled metal tube handle

Maybe try using a steel wire bristle wheel on a grinder/buffer to create a little rugosity on the surface of the handle tube to help prevent slipping of your hand. For more $$ and a more professional look, a machine shop might put regular knurling pattern onto the handle surface. Of course, that will likely cost you several times more than the knife cost in the first place. ;) Either of these will create pockets and crannies where food particles and grease can gather, so thorough sanitation would be the order of the day.

Another texture technique may be a gritty epoxy as used on garage floors or gritty paint as used on boat decks. I suspect getting small quantity for test purposes may prove tough. They usually sell those sorts of systems in multi-gallon quantities.

HTH.
 
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It's still in the knife block, but I'm not going to butcher a bird with it. It'll be more for a replacement for a French chef's knife. It works just fine for chopping veggies, slicing beef, roasts, that kind of thing. For birds, I watched the Alton Brown fried chicken recipe video to learn how to properly butcher a raw chicken and just decided to go with that. Part them out first, then grill. Just thinking out loud here, but I could probably use the Bushman to butcher the Alton Brown way before cooking, but I haven't tried it yet.

I did notice Alton put on a pair of latex gloves before he got started. I have a box or two laying around here, I wonder if that would make any difference.

Turkeys are 99c/lb this week again at Safeway so I might pick up another one and do it again.

My wife can't eat beans for medical reasons, so I have to find a way to use up five gallons of dried beans I've accumulated over the years. I thought a turkey/bacon/bean soup would be a good way to go. I don't even know how many jars of that kind of soup I could put up before I ran out of beans. Maybe a gross? Whenever turkey goes on sale, I'm going to have to make sure to pick up one or two and a couple packs of hog jowl bacon and make some turkey/bacon/bean soup.
 
econnofoot said:
Sorry not to sound like a smart ass, but the entire image I'm getting of you using a Cold Steel Bushman in the kitchen is comical.
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The most comical knife-in-the-kitchen video I've seen was a guy who bought a HI Khukri and proceeded to process fish with it. Remove the head and tail, gut, skin, and fillet with a (I'm guessing) 20oz Khukri. Then again, supposedly he did a good job. None of the comments sounded derogatory. I'm not saying compare my experiment with his, but it was pretty cool to watch. I'd have to make a video of me butchering a turkey or a chicken before it would make any sense to compare the two.

Chicken was on sale this week but not turkey, and I forgot the buttermilk, so I doubt I'll do much other than shearing the chicken up the back and BBQing it in the style my grill has become accustomed to.

BTW, Alton Brown is not the last word in cooking. He used a Belgian waffle maker to cook his bacon rather than grilling it, so no points for him on that. It did make me wonder how waffles made in a Belgian waffle maker greased with hot bacon grease would taste....

Dunno, I just like cooking.
 
not being able to find a kitchen knife i am happy with for less than $150 is the reason i am making my first knife. i am making a cross between a chef's knife and a cleaver. stiff back, very sharp, not to long(5 1/2" x 2" blade), Aldo's 1084 steel. i have a 4 star elephant sabatier chef's knife but it is way to big.
 
Peak_Oil said:
I could probably use the Bushman to butcher the Alton Brown
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You know, you could just change the channel instead of choosing such a drastic action.

Peak_Oil said:
The most comical knife-in-the-kitchen video I've seen was a guy who bought a HI Khukri and proceeded to process fish with it. Remove the head and tail, gut, skin, and fillet with a (I'm guessing) 20oz Khukri./QUOTE]

I thought that video was awesomeness. Shared it with a few folks online who cut sushi and sashimi for a living and at least one of them died inside a little. :( I still think it's awesome.

Have you tried or considered any of the grip-enhancing ideas?
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I tried it again today with a turkey and butchered it the Alton Brown way. Cold steel Bushman Bowie vs 18lb turkey, and it came apart easy as pie. The wings came off when I cut deeper into the meat than I thought I should, but that's what worked. I dislocated the hip and knee joints before going after those parts, and they just fell apart. The ACL still took about three slices to get through, but no big deal.

I did the breast as a double breast and slow cooked it after a long brine, and it came out just like I wanted.

I guess there IS a place for a $20 cheap survival knife in the kitchen.... even on the holidays.

Tell me more about the grip-enhancing ideas.
 
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