The chef’s knife looks like the generic “kitchen knife” image you get when you Google “kitchen knives,” and that’s because it is, in a way, kind of generic. It probably evolved with modern cookery in order to handle the large volume of chopping, slicing, and cutting busy kitchens require, because it’s a knife that can handle a wide range of tasks. Typically about 8 inches long, agile enough for dicing and sturdy enough for chopping, if you had to choose just one knife for your kitchen, it would be this one.

The boning knife looks like a serious knife with a specific purpose because it is. As the name implies, its main use is to debone things—peeling the protein away from the bone. It’s thin, sharp, and usually a bit flexible so you can insert the blade easily and scrape away the meat. Although that might sound like something a casual chef won’t need to do at home, you’ll actually use a boning knife a lot if you attempt any serious carnivorous cooking.

Slicing good, fresh bread is harder than it looks—if you’re using a dull or inappropriate knife, what happens is you have to work too hard to get through the crust and you wind up tearing the soft innards of the loaf into crumbles. A bread knife is specifically designed to be long and sharp enough to saw through even the hardiest of breads, while the typically serrated edge preserves the carby goodness inside.

Like all tools, size matters. A chef’s knife is designed to be “good enough” for a wide variety of tasks, but when you’re dealing with small ingredients or delicate cuts, the smaller-scale paring knife gives you more control and precision than its larger cousins. The shorter blade also gives you more control when you’re working the point into a challenging spot, making this one of the essential knives for any kitchen.

The classic cleaver is instantly familiar to just about anyone, and is designed for a satisfying chop. This broad, rectangular knife is used to cut through meat, gristle, and bone when chopping joints or poultry, but it’s also useful in chopping up vegetables—or anything, really—with a tough outer skin. That being said, some cooks use the cleaver for a lot of different things—like every tool it’s more about the skill you put into it. Some folks even use them as bench scrapers (see below).

This is a pretty specialized knife mainly used when serving meat. Its long, pointed blade is designed to cut through meat smoothly and easily, producing smooth, aesthetically pleasing slices of desired thickness without much effort or mess. If you’ve ever tried carving the Thanksgiving turkey with some other knife and wound up with something that looked like shredded chicken, you understand why a carving knife is necessary.

As the name implies, the utility knife is a jack of most trades. Smaller than a chef’s knife but larger than a paring knife, the utility knife is mainly used to cut fruits and vegetables, but can be used for any task where the chef’’s knife is too large and the paring knife too small. As such, it’s not exactly a necessity in your kitchen, but you may find yourself wishing you had one for mid-range foods.

It’s true that the steak knife is generally used for eating and not cooking, but it’s still technically part of your kitchen knife toolset. Short and typically serrated, the steak knife is designed to cut through all manner of meats with ease. No matter how tender and fall-off-the-bone your food is, a steak knife is essential for the final, most important stage of cooking dinner: eating it.

Fillet knives are similar in form and function to boning knives, but their blades are typically thinner and have a more pronounced curve. You really only use a fillet knife if you’re preparing fish—it’s ideal for removing the skin and slicing the fish into perfect fillets. If you don’t cook fresh fish often or if you buy your fish pre-filleted, you can live without this one.

The mezzaluna knife is a pretty specialized knife. It has two handles and is shaped like a half-moon (that’s what “mezzaluna” means in Italian). It’s designed to be used in a rocking motion to cut vegetables, herbs, or anything else that needs to be chopped up. The rocking motion of the mezzaluna can chop that stuff up very quickly and finely, but it’s a knife you’ll only need if you’re preparing a lot of herbs or veggies all the time.

If you’re using your paring knife to peel fruits and veggies all the time, you might realize that while it works, it’s not ideal. A peeling knife is a specialized knife designed to handle round fruits and vegetables with ease. It has a slightly curved and very sharp blade that will make short work of any apples, potatoes, or any other round foods you want to slice the skin from.

If you’ve ever tried to slice a tomato with any old knife and found yourself crushing the poor thing instead, sending juice everywhere, you need a tomato knife. This short, serrated knife is designed to slice through the skin of a tomato (or any tomato-like fruit or vegetable) cleanly, and the ewer tip is ideal for both coring a tomato and moving slices to a plate. This is not an essential knife if your relationship with tomatoes is more on the casual side, and you can always just use a bread knife. But if you’re feeling fancy and you use a lot of tomatoes in your cooking, you might pick one up.

Some might argue that the bench scraper isn’t a knife, per se, but it is a bladed tool used in cookery, so it’s included here. The bench scraper is a flat, square blade that’s mainly used to slice dough, transfer that dough to a pan or plate, and then scrape the cutting board or countertops to get the leftover dough and flour off. If you bake a lot, a bench scraper will make your life a lot easier. If you’re serious about your bread you might also want a bread lame (right); it’s used to score the dough prior to baking to allow the dough to expand without cracking the crust. Some bakers get very creative with their scoring, too.

If you try cutting cakes with a bread knife, you will have varying degrees of success. Some cakes, like sponge cakes, are very doughy and will cling to a bread knife, turning your attempt at a slice into a mangled lump. A confectioner’s knife has a rounded, serrated blade that makes cutting into dense cakes easy, producing pro-level slices every time.

This Japanese knife is an alternative to the standard chef’s knife. Like that knife, it’s a multi-use knife that can be applied to just about any task in the kitchen, but it tends to be lighter and more versatile, and it has cute (but useful) little dimples. This tends to come down to preference; if you’re using a chef’s knife and finding it fatigues your arm or is a bit too big and thick for what you’re doing, a santoku knife might be the ideal substitution.

The nakiri knife is a Japanese blade that looks a bit like an elongated cleaver. It has a long flat blade that makes it perfect for cutting vegetables—the length of the blade means you can slice everything on a cutting board at once. It’s also great for cutting long vegetables like zucchinis, eggplant, or cucumbers. If you chop a lot of veggies when you cook, a nakiri might save you some time and some muscle fatigue.

Need to peel a grape? A fluting knife is a small, sharp knife that can handle smaller-scale veggies and fruits that are too small even for a paring or peeling knife. It’s also used for “decorative” functions, like cutting fruits into specific shapes, so it’s a knife that only very dedicated cooks will ever have a need for. In most cases, paring and peeling knives will be all you need, but if you’re going to make an edible arrangement out of a bunch of fruits, you’ll find it a lot easier with a fluting knife.

When it comes to extremely specific knives, the salmon knife is in a league of its own. This long, narrow, extremely thin knife is used exclusively to slice fish very thin, and is mainly used in preparing smoked salmon, hence the name. The chances that you will ever need one are pretty small, although some folks use these when making their own sushi at home.

If you love shellfish, you’ll probably want to invest in an oyster knife. These short, thick, and relatively dull knives are intended to be used to open oysters relatively quickly (and relatively safely). Once you’ve pried open the shell, the knife can then be used to separate the delicious meat from its shell prison. If you don’t prepare a lot of shellfish at home you probably won’t need this, but then again who’s to say you won’t someday be the person who prepares oysters for a snack at home?