We tested these Henckels knives and loved their durable, full-tang design

Whether for chopping vegetables, carving meat, mincing garlic or slicing bread, high-quality knives are some of the most essential tools for any kitchen. The Henckels Premium Quality 15-Piece Knife Set may be a bit of an investment, but its high-quality knives are durable enough to last for years. 

The BestReviews Testing Lab spent a week with the Henckels Premium Quality 15-Piece Knife Set to see just how well it stacks up against other popular knives. We sliced onion and tomatoes, minced garlic, diced bell peppers, cut fresh herbs and sliced bread, noting how easily the knives moved through each food. We also considered how easy the knives were to grip and how comfortable they were to hold, even for longer chopping sessions. 

Overall, we think experienced home chefs who are looking to upgrade their current knife set will appreciate all that the Henckels Premium Quality 15-Piece Knife Set has to offer and find it well worth the price. 

What is the Henckels Premium Quality Knife Set?

The Henckels Premium Quality Knife Set is backed by a lifetime warranty against manufacturer’s defects, so they’re ideal for kitchens where they’ll see heavy use.

Product specifications
Number of Pieces: 15 | Blade Material: High carbon stainless steel | Handle Material: Plastic | Blade Construction: Full-tang | Dishwasher-safe: Yes

The Henckels Premium Quality 15-Piece Knife Set features 12 versatile knives with high carbon stainless blades, a honing steel, a pair of kitchen shears and a wooden block to hold all the components. Their full-tang design gave them a highly durable, sturdy feel in our hands, while the precision-stamped construction allowed them to be super sharp right out of the box. We cleanly sliced tomatoes and onions in extremely thin cuts but also chopped hard vegetables like carrots and potatoes with ease. Best of all, the blades remained incredibly sharp throughout our testing, so we didn’t experience any resistance even after using them regularly for five days. The included honing steel makes it easy to sharpen them if they get dull, though. 

Overall, the knives felt well-balanced and easy to control in our hands. However, while we found the plastic handles pretty comfortable to hold, they had more edges than other knives we tested, so they could sometimes get uncomfortable when chopping or dicing for extended periods. The knives don’t have a bolster between the blade and the handle, either, so we sometimes worried about our fingers slipping down along a knife’s edge. The knives are dishwasher-safe for easy cleaning, but we found they were very easy to hand-wash with warm water and dish soap, too. 

See how it compares to other products in its space — check out our reviews for the best kitchen knife sets.

Price and where to buy

The Henckels Premium Quality 15-Piece Knife Set typically retails for $345. It is available at Amazon.

Why we like it

• Full-tang construction: The Henckels knives feel extremely sturdy and durable because their blades feature full-tang construction, allowing them to extend through the handle. The handles have triple rivets to hold the blades in place, so they are made to last through heavy chopping. 
• Comfortable handles: The knives in the Henckels Premium Quality 15-Piece Knife Set have handles with a slight curve to their underside, so they fit comfortably in our hands during chopping, dicing, slicing and mincing. The plastic material doesn’t have a slick finish, either, enabling us to get a solid grip on them. 
• Precise, efficient cutting: Not only are the Henckels knives razor-sharp straight out of the box, but they also hold their edge as well as any of the knives we tested. That allows for precise, accurate cutting with minimal effort, so you can make quick work of even the most labor-intensive food-prep tasks. 
• Dishwasher-safe: Unlike many other premium knife sets, the Henckels knives are dishwasher-safe for fast, easy cleaning. If you prefer hand-washing your knives, though, they clean easily with soap and water, too. 

What we don’t like

• Price: Given its high-quality materials and design, it’s no surprise that the Henckels Premium Quality 15-Piece Knife Set was the most expensive knife set we tested. However, that means that it won’t fit all budgets. 
• Lack of wide bolster: Unlike other knives we tested, the Henckel knives don’t feature a bolster between their blades and handles. As a result, we worried about our fingers accidentally sliding along the edge, so we had to be a bit more mindful of our grip than with other knives. 

Henckels Premium Quality 15-Piece Knife Set setup

It took approximately 25 minutes to unwrap, wash and set up the knife set.

The Henckels Premium Quality 15-Piece Knife Set arrived in a branded box, with the knives and the block packaged separately. The knives came in a smaller cardboard box and wrapped in plastic. The blades all had cardboard sheaths and plastic caps on the tips to prevent accidental nicks while unwrapping them. The block was also wrapped in plastic to protect it from any damage during shipping. 

After we unboxed the pieces, we hand-washed the knives and tools with dish soap and warm water and then thoroughly dried them. Next, we placed all of them in the slots in the block, so they were ready for use. In total, it took approximately 25 minutes to unwrap, wash and set up the knife set. 

Included knives and accessories

The knife set comes with a wooden knife block to help organize the 12 knives and two tools.

The Henckels Premium Quality 15-Piece Knife Set contains 12 knives, two tools and a knife block. 

It includes: 

• An 8-inch chef’s knife for multipurpose food-prep tasks, including chopping, dicing, slicing and mincing everything from vegetables and fruit to large pieces of meat 
• An 8-inch bread knife for slicing bread, cake and other delicate baked goods
• A 7-inch santoku knife for slicing, dicing and mincing meat, vegetables and more
• A 5-inch serrated utility knife for slicing smaller cakes and loaves of bread, slicing delicate fruits and vegetables and cutting through tougher foods
• A 3-inch paring knife for peeling fruit and vegetables, slicing smaller foods like garlic, deveining shrimp and other more precise food-prep tasks 
• Six 4.5-inch steak knives for cutting through cooked meat and other tougher foods
• Kitchen shears for cutting fresh herbs, trimming poultry and other meat and opening plastic packaging 
• A honing steel for sharpening the knives
• A wooden knife block to hold all the knives and tools

Thanks to their razor-sharp blades, all the Henckels knives performed their designated tasks well. During testing, we quickly chopped onions and bell peppers for a stir-fried recipe and diced tomatoes for a pasta sauce with the chef’s knife. The santoku knife efficiently sliced through tomatoes and onions for burger toppings, while the paring knife was excellent for peeling carrots and potatoes for soup. The bread knife was our favorite knife, though, because it neatly sliced a loaf of sourdough bread without squishing any of the pieces. The serrated utility knife was effective for bread, too, but its shorter length made it a bit inefficient for slicing larger loaves. The kitchen shears came in handy for cutting fresh basil for our pasta sauce, as well as raw bacon that we were rendering for a soup base. 

Overall, we found the Henckels Premium Quality 15-Piece Knife Set to be a very complete set. There were no knives we needed for our everyday cooking tasks that it didn’t include, making it a very versatile option.  

Blade material and design

The Henckels knives’ blades are made of stain- and rust-free high-carbon steel, so they are safe to be used in the dishwasher.

The Henckels knives have blades made of a single piece of high-carbon stainless steel, so they have a full-tang design. They are also precision stamped, making them highly durable. During testing, the knives’ blades felt incredibly sturdy and had a very sharp edge that made it easy to cut through everything from ripe tomatoes to raw chicken with ease. We also found the blades were just heavy enough to make slicing through harder, denser foods incredibly easy while still having a lightweight design that prevented fatigue when chopping for longer periods. 

Handle material and design

The Henckels knives feature a stainless steel endcap on their handles, improving their durability and giving them a more balanced feel in your hand.

The Henckels knives have plastic handles that are triple-riveted to the full-tang blades that extend through the handles. When we cut with them, the handles had a sturdy, secure feel, so we have plenty of confidence in their long-term durability. During testing, the knives were also comfortable to hold, but their handles had more square edges than other knives we tested, which could cause some discomfort if we weren’t careful about how we gripped them. 

Also worth noting is that the Henckels knives don’t have a defined bolster, which is a band that connects the blade to the handle. It’s a natural place to rest your thumb and forefinger while holding the knife and prevents your fingers from accidentally sliding across the blade edge. Because the knives lacked a bolster, we felt we had to be more conscious of where we placed our fingers when using them than with some of the other knife sets we tested. 

Edge retention 

The testing team did not need to sharpen the knives after a week of use.

We used the Henckels Premium Quality 15-Piece Knife Set for daily food-prep tasks for five days and were also impressed with how well the knives held their edge through nearly a week of testing, including chopping carrots, potatoes and cucumbers, slicing hard-crusted bread and carving a London broil. We didn’t notice any resistance while cutting, even toward the end of the week, and only used the included honing steel before we finished our testing just to see how it performed. Overall, our experience suggests these knives wouldn’t need sharpening more than once every one to two months.

Honing steel

The honing steel gives a razor-sharp edge to the knives.

The Henckels Premium Quality 15-Piece Knife Set includes a honing steel for sharpening the knives. Like the knife blades, it’s made of high-carbon stainless steel and features a comfortable plastic handle. We found it extremely easy to use, so we only had to run the knives along its length at a 20-degree angle four to six times to sharpen the edges. The knives were still very sharp after five days of testing, but we found the blades were like new after using the honing steel, giving them a razor-sharp edge that made cutting even easier. 

How does it compare to other knife sets we’ve tested?

Alongside the Cuisinart 15-Piece Knife Set with Block, the Henckels Premium Quality 15-Piece Knife Set felt like the highest-quality knives we tested. Like the Cuisinart knives, the Henckels knives had a good weight that helped do some of the work when cutting through hard or dense foods. They were also super sharp, making it easy to slice cleanly through nearly any food. The Cuisinart knives have an extra-wide bolster that the Henckels knives lack, so we found them a bit more comfortable and easier to control. 

The Henckels knives were a clear step up from the McCook Knife Set and the Hunter.Dual Knife Set, which both had a much lighter feel in hand. We sometimes had to use a bit more force when cutting hard food with these knives because the weight of the knives didn’t help the blade move through the food as it did for the Henckels set. The Hunter.Dual knives also felt somewhat flimsy, so we had concerns about their long-term durability. The Henckels knives clearly featured premium materials and construction, making us confident they would last for years of regular use. 

Testing the Henckels Premium Quality Knife Set

The testing team evaluated the Henckels knife set on performance, design, durability and more.

To evaluate how well the Henckels Premium Quality Knife Set performed, we used the knives to slice onions and tomatoes, assessing how sharp they were and how cleanly they cut. We also used the knives for a series of standard food-prep tasks, including peeling carrots and potatoes, mincing garlic, slicing bread, chopping onions and bell peppers, cutting fresh herbs, carving cooked meat and cubing raw chicken. We also made sure to chop for at least 20 minutes to evaluate how comfortable the knives were for prolonged cutting sessions. Additionally, we assessed how well the knives held their edge by slicing onions and tomatoes again at the end of our testing period to see if the cuts were as clean as our first attempt.

At the end of testing, we also used the included honing steel to sharpen the blades, so we could determine how easy it was to use and how effective it was for sharpening. We also hand-washed the knives with warm water and dish soap to see how easy they were to clean. 

Should you get the Henckels Premium Quality Knife Set?

The Henckels Premium Quality Knife Set is ideal for experienced home chefs.

The Henckels Premium Quality Knife Set lives up to its name with high-quality knives that perform their intended tasks better than nearly all the other knife sets we tested. However, we recommend them mainly for seasoned home chefs looking to upgrade their existing knives. That’s because their price may make them too steep an investment for beginner or casual home cooks. The lack of a bolster between the blade and handle makes them trickier to use, too, so they’re a better choice for those with plenty of kitchen experience.