Caidao

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Caidao" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

A Chinese chef's knife — sometimes referred to as a Càidāo (Chinese: 菜刀, lit. "vegetable knife"), a Chinese knife, the rectangular-bladed, all-purpose chef’s knife used to prepare a variety of meats, fish and vegetables. The popularity of this style of knife has spread with the associated cuisines. They resemble Western cleavers in appearance, but most Chinese chef's knives are relatively thin-bladed and designed for slicing, finely chopping and mincing vegetables, fish and boneless meats. The heavier gǔdāo (Chinese: 骨刀, lit. "bone knife") are produced and are used much like Western-type meat cleavers to prepare large sides of beef, pork and other boned meats. However, Chinese-style knives of this weight are not common in the West.

The Chinese chef's knife is frequently incorrectly referred to as a "cleaver", due its similar rectangular shape. However Chinese chef’s knives are much thinner in cross-section and are intended more as general-purpose kitchen knives, and mostly used to slice boneless meats, chop, slice, dice, or mince vegetables, and to flatten garlic bulbs or ginger; while also serving as a scraper to carry prepared ingredients to the bowls or the wok.