Chef’s Choice Poultry Kitchen Shears

Cooking Scissors Stainless Steel 9 Inch

Chef's Choice Poultry Kitchen Shears Kitchen shears usually look and work like ordinary scissors. The only feature that makes them kitchen shears is that they come apart easily for cleaning. This pair of poultry shears from Chef's Choice beats that old paper-cutting design handily. The 9-Inch Poultry Shears cut meat, skin and gristle, and snip small bones. For the kitchen, this works much better than paper shears.

Built more like surgical tools than scissors, the slender curved high carbon steel blades slip between joints when butchering whole poultry. The all-metal design eliminates most places food bits and bacteria could hide, but for a thorough cleaning, the scissors disassemble and reassemble easily. The spring-loaded handles do provide a little challenge if you haven't done this before, but with practice, it's a snap.

The spring keeps the jaws open in the resting position, which makes starting a cut simpler than finishing one. Most manual tools take some getting used to, and your hands may ache the first few times you use these shears. That's pretty normal for clippers and shears, and the spring does ease the other ache you get from opening shears without that help. The lack of padding makes extended work tougher on the hands, but any rubberized sealer on scissor handles works loose quickly anyway. In the kitchen, that makes cross-contamination a problem -- a clean build like this is safer.

One more perk -- for safe storage, squeeze the handles together and latch the blades shut with the stainless steel safety catch. It saves fingers as well as blade edges by closing the cutting gap. Store these cutters in the shears slot of your knife block for even better protection.