The Many Kinds Of Deba Knife

The mioroshi deba or mioroshi has a thinner blade than the deba and ai-deba. Slide through the images above to compare a mioroshi against a regular deba. You'll see a noticeable difference!

The mioroshi's shape is a mixture of a deba and a yanagiba, making them amazing for filleting fish. But, the mioroshi's lack of thickness means it can chip on tough materials. It is best to be careful.

A mioroshi is lighter and easier to wield than deba or ai-deba knives. This makes them popular with fishmongers who fillet a lot of fish and need nimbleness. While mioroshi are in 30mm increments instead of 15mm, they come in longer sizes. Much like the mioroshi's shape, the maximum length (300mm) is between a deba (240mm) and a yanagiba (390mm). We recommend a 210mm length mioroshi, but if you have a larger home kitchen, a 240mm works too.

The ajikiri existed for a single purpose - to fillet aji, known as horse mackerel in English. These days ajikiri are also used for other small fish with smaller bones.

An ajikiri is much shorter than the average deba. Ajikiri knives range from 90mm to 150mm, and are about half as thick as an ai-deba knife. This makes ajikiri light and maneuverable, perfect for nimbler tasks. This also makes them more inexpensive, as there's less steel used in forging the knife.

While ajikiri are more single-purpose than other deba types, they fill a role larger deba can't. An ajikiri might not be your first deba knife, but it's worth considering if you want to expand your range.

Double-edged versions of ajikiri knives are starting to enter the market too. They make for excellent multi-purpose knives that are wider than a petty knife.

Funayuki knives, sometimes called hunayuki knives translates as "boating knife" in English. As you'd expect, it's often used on boats by fishermen! Yet, it's not used for processing fish caught that day. It's a simple, light cooking knife so fishermen could stay out fishing for longer.

People now also use funayuki knives as small, convenient, single-edged home-use knives. We recommend funayuki quite often in our store for this need. Like the ajikiri knife, double-edged funayuki are now also starting to appear.

Funayuki knives are like a smaller version of a mioroshi deba knife. Compared to mioroshi, they are thinner, lighter, and have a shorter blade length. They are still thicker than a yanagiba, meaning they can cut vegetables too. This makes them a popular complementary knife to santoku or gyuto knives. While they are less versatile, they bring that unique single-edged sharpness.

In short, they make amazing multi-purpose knives in the home. They're great for those who want a small single-edged knife that can handle many tasks. Yet, a funayuki does not replace a deba knife in the kitchen. If you wouldn't bite into it with your teeth, don't cut it with a funayuki.

The fugu-deba, much like the ajikiri is for one type of fish. In this case, that is blowfish or fugu. Yet, unlike other deba knives that can handle many kinds of fish, these are single-purpose. While ajikiri are now used for cutting many smaller fish, fugu-deba are only used for fugu and tough fish.

As the picture above shows, they have a shorter cutting angle. This sometimes means they are not as thick.

There is a less visible difference though, and it is very major. Fugu-deba are rather blunt!

Fugu have rock-like bones, so fugu-deba have very different cutting edges. This is to prevent the blade from chipping on those thick bones. But, it makes the knife less multi-purpose as a result.

This knife is only used for fish with strong, dense bone structures. Fugu is the top of that chain, but these knives work on some eels too. An eel knife serves that purpose better, but.

This is a less common knife, with less variety out there. Still, it is an important part of Japanese cuisine and is still used by chefs worldwide daily!