I noticed in a breakdown video while butchering a cow. Is it due to fibers being more stringy after being cooked? My other thought is the temperature of the meat.
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Think about other blades that are always serrated–steak knives, bread knives, saw blades (for cutting wood or metal). The reason for the serrations is to introduce a horizontal component to your force, making it easier to cut through the material as you move back and forth through it. The serrations rip into the material, tearing as well as slicing it. A straight blade relies almost entirely on vertical downward force and would require more effort in general. Imagine cutting through the crust of bread with a straight blade… you’d end up squashing your bread. The serrations allow you exert very little downward force and still quickly cut through the material. You do however end up with more of a mess from the crumbs that it rips off the bread.
Also, we typically use them while seated whereas the butcher is standing over his cuts. When seated, it is harder to create the needed downward force to cut through something.
So why do we use a serrated blade for steaks but not raw? The reason why steaks are harder to cut through is because the meat is cooked. The proteins in the meat have denatured and become tougher as a result, so the serrated knife allows you to saw through it.
Also, as one user already mentioned, the straight blade makes a prettier slice which is because it doesn’t rip into the material.
And the serrated knife has the advantage of a blade that is mostly protected from being dulled on the plate because it is arched up. The only part that touches the plate are the little pointed tips of the serration, which is a small fraction of the blade, since the length of each tip is probably on the order of a hundred, maybe less, microns. For a 8 inch blade, that would be about 200mm or 200,000 μm. If there are about 12 points per in, that’s 100 points about. If each point has a distance of 100 μm (a hair is like 80 microns on average, I think), that’s 10,000μm total, and 8,000/200,000 is 5% of the blade. So 95% of the blade is never touching the plate. That’s pretty damn good if you want it to stay sharp.
What do you mean by “teeth with no knives”?
I think the main reason is that as a restaurant you simply don’t want to give really sharp knives to public. People will hurt themselves, and will hirt badly. Serrated knifes still work, and are way safer than scalpel-sharp blades professional butchers use.
I’d guess because a serrated knife uses a more sawing motion a curved tip with a straight edge allows clean slices making the finished cuts look more presentable.
Serrations would damage the meat a bit.
Think of a surgeon using a scalpel (razor) rather than a saw.
Because serrations aren’t really necessary, and when you’re cutting meat for hours on end, the knife will dull and be MUCH harder to sharpen if it’s serrated. A couple quick swipes of the blade on a honing steel will put a razor edge back on it and seconds, and you can just keep cutting away unbothered, if there’s no serration to worry about.
The effort required to saw through meat with a dull serrated knife is WAY more than with a razor-sharp straight blade. Not to mention that when you’re boning out the meat, you want to be able to draw the blade smoothly directly across the bone without it snagging on bone or tendons/sinew. Serrations will constantly snag on that, and it’s not only a ton of effort, it’s also dangerous when your hands are covered with meat, fat and blood.
Straight-edge blades make a nicer looking cut of meat than serrated blades do as as well, and leaves less random torn muscle fiber behind to have to clean up, throw away, or toss in the grind bucket.
Even most table knives have little micro serrations, even though they’re never sharp to begin with. When you’re just eating a steak, the blade doesn’t need to be that sharp, and the serrations can make up for the fact that the blade is dull, and it won’t need to be sharpened regularly due to having been scraped against countless plates. But if you’re breaking down a carcass, you want that blade as sharp as possible, to minimize the time and effort it takes you to get the job done.
Hard, straight blades work flawlessly, and cut through everything in a matter of seconds, but on a plate they will dull quickly.
A serrated blade saws which ultimately will work no matter how dull it is, but it’s slow and produces ugly work.
Ideally, customers would have a tiny version of a kitchen knife, but one wrong move the can kill someone in under a minute.
If you can slice through a two inch steak without effort, the other people at your table as just as easy to cut to ribbons.
People have serrated knives because a fifty cent one will “cut” forever. But a butcher can’t use them because packaged meats will look like they were cut off with a chainsaw. In my home, serrated knives get most use on bread.
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Because butcher knives are *extremely* sharp, they’ll slice through bodily tissue with little effort. Serrated steak knives are assumed to be used for long periods without sharpening, so the serrations extend the edge life.
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