Wirecutter - An exceptional bread knife

Michael Hession

Tim Heffernan

When I began baking sourdough in earnest a few years ago, I quickly discovered that my old serrated knife literally wasn’t cutting it.

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I’ve used the Tojiro that we recommend as an upgrade pick for more than five years, and it’s a great knife. But its reverse-scalloped blade, so effective at slicing through vegetables, meat, and tough-skinned fruits, just skittered over the dense crusts of my loaves. I had to press down so hard to get it to bite that I wound up crushing the bread.

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So I forked over 22 bucks and bought Mercer’s 10-inch serrated knife, our runner-up pick. I’ve been a happy camper ever since.

The Mercer has a generously-sized blade that can cut a round loaf in half with just a few strokes (though the blade actually 9.5 inches long, not the 10 advertised). Its traditional pointed teeth dig eagerly into tough crusts, instead of slipping like my Tojiro did, making for much safer slicing. And its chubby, rubbery handle provides a tactile, comfortable grip—one that fits my big paw and the small hand of my wife, Lindsay, equally well.

Most people probably won’t buy the Mercer for its looks, though you can get it with a number of accent-colored handles to jazz things up a bit. Yellow, green, purple, red, gray, and blue versions are available, and you’ll often find them at a lower price than the standard solid black.

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But who cares how it looks? The Mercer bread knife is a tool designed to do one job, and it does that job exceptionally well.

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Check out the photo below: That’s a clean slice through a 2-pound, 9-inch round loaf in three strokes, without crushing the crumb at all and leaving a neat edge on the crust. That means I can lay the cut side down on the cutting board and the loaf will stay fresh for at least three days.

Tim Heffernan

I liked my Mercer so much that I recently bought another one for my dad. He’d got himself a pretty decent kitchen-knife set from Henckels, but like most sets, it came with an abominable bread knife. It was one of those tiddly, all-too-familiar eight-inch disasters that are too short to do any real slicing and too dull to give even Wonderbread a scare. I hated it beyond words.

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I bake when I visit him, and it’s great to finally have a good knife on hand after years of frustration. My big brother also does the sourdough thing, and after using the Mercer at dad’s he bought one for himself, too. He’s a surgeon, by the way, so I figure if it meets the needs of a guy who spends his days handling the sharpest knives on earth, it’ll meet just about everyone’s.

We tested 13 serrated knives, spending 15 hours cutting up tomatoes, peaches, pineapples, and watermelons, slicing loaves of crusty bread and soft dinner rolls, and carving roast beef. Here’s why we love the Mercer:

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• It has been our runner-up pick since 2016, and it still typically sells for around the same $22 that it did then.

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• It nearly matched the performance of our top pick from Victorinox—and at less than half the Victorinox’s price.

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• After making thousands of slices of sourdough over the course of three years, it’s still as sharp as new, and the stainless-steel blade shows no sign of corrosion.

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Read more in our review of serrated knives.

If you see the Mercer for $15 or under, it’s worth picking up. The price for the standard black handle bounces around a lot, and often dips down around there from the typical $22.

The Mercer requires no special care as long as you wash it by hand, dry it, and put it away somewhere where the teeth won't get damaged, such as a knife block. Banging around inside a dishwasher could damage the blade’s teeth, and serrated knives are tricky to resharpen. With normal use and handwashing, though, it should stay sharp for a lifetime.