When most people hear the word “cleaver,” they probably imagine a cartoon chef chasing a small crab around a kitchen, splitting tables in half and wreaking havoc. While we don’t recommend bringing that sort of chaotic energy into your own kitchen, there’s a good chance bringing in a cleaver might be just what you need. There is more than one type of cleaver, however. Meat cleavers are hefty, blunt, and designed to crack through bone. Chinese cleavers, on the other hand, are thinner, sharper, and often used more like a chef’s knife for slicing, chopping, and mincing. You don’t want to mix them up though. In fact, many knife sellers will add a caveat to their Chinese cleaver listings: Because they’re made with thinner, sharper edges, they tend to chip when attempting to chop through bone, which, if your notion of a cleaver is the aforementioned crab chasing, you might try to do.
Our top picks
- The best overall cleaver: Tojiro Fuji Chinese Cleaver
- The best Chinese cleaver: CCK Stainless Steel Chinese Cleaver
- The best meat cleaver: Lamson Heavy Duty Cleaver
- The best budget meat cleaver: Henckels Classic Cleaver
Knowing exactly what you want out of a cleaver is a great way to figure out which style might better fit what you are looking for. If you’ve already got a solid knife collection but want something to break down whole chickens on a regular basis, a meat cleaver will do you dandy. Looking for an adept slicer that’s great at mincing herbs? You’re likely in the market for a Chinese cleaver. In reality, most butchers don’t use cleavers very often and instead opt for boning knives and other thin, sharp blades that let them separate joints with finesse.
Though they both have separate use cases, the thing that bonds these cleavers together is a large, rectangular, wedge-shaped blade with a short handle and all of the weight-balance tilting toward the tip. That extra weight in the blade helps the cleaver do the work for you, be it butchering poultry or slicing bell pepper for a stir fry. We put both styles of cleavers to the test to figure out which cleavers were best in their category—and to see if there was one cleaver that could do both.
The best overall cleaver: Tojiro Fuji Chinese Cleaver
Tojiro Fuji Chinese Cleaver
Pros
- Very sharp
- Affordable price point
Cons
- Front heavy
- Thicker spine
- Blade Length: 7 inches
- Blade Material: Stainless steel
- Handle Material: Rosewood
The Tojiro Fuji cleaver is technically a Chinese-style cleaver. But it’s low-cost, sharp, and has the durability to act as a meat cleaver in a pinch. Taken together that makes it the best all-purpose cleaver we tested
What we love: Tojiro has regularly impressed us with the quality of their knives at affordable price points,
