Yellow Steel #2 - High Carbon Steel

Yellow Steel (Kigami) is a material commonly used in tough environments such as culinary schools and fish processing facilities. Made popular thanks to Hitachi Metals, a renowned kitchen knife steel manufacturer, this steel remains well-known and useful due to its price point, and just how easy it is to sharpen.

Steel material is crucial for indicating a knife's initial performance (amongst many other things related to craftsman ability and more). Below are some comparisons to give you some understanding showing what a particular step of the process does in terms of impacting sharpness, balance and maintainability.

There’s three key pointers in the above chart to focus on.

• Steel Material has a large impact on sharpness and maintainability (ease of sharpening and resistance to rust).

• Apart from sharpness, heat treatment and the sharpening process in knife creation also have a large impact on sharpness.

• Measuring a knife’s strengths is more than just its sharpness. Balance and maintainability also need to be considered.

Based on the above steel mapping chart, Yellow Steel #2 falls in this position on the graph below

A sharp cut and inexpensive price at the cost of brittleness

Let’s look at the tables below and explore the composition of Yellow Steel #2 more deeply. Pay attention closely to the Major Materials tab here:

When compared to the popular White Steel #2 also made by Hitachi Metals, we see a higher concentration of materials like phosphorus and sulfur, which can contribute to brittleness so these knives must be handled with care.

An interesting point is that the carbon content of Yellow Steel #2 is still approximately 1.1 (or above.) This actually puts the steel’s hardness (sharpness) as comparable to White Steel #2 and Blue Steel #2 despite the reduced HRC - indicating that it isn’t lacking in the sharpness department and will still cut well.