5 Best Boning Knives, According to Testing

The experts in the Good Housekeeping Institute Kitchen Appliances and Innovation Lab regularly test all kinds of knives, including chef's knives, bread knives, and paring knives.

To test boning knives, we butcher a whole chicken: We remove the legs, breasts, and wings, and then separate the parts of the legs and wings, cutting through the spine. These tests allow us to assess the knife's ability to slice through joints as well as to maneuver around different shapes.

If a knife excels in our chicken test, we score the tough skin on a pork shoulder and then remove the skin, fat, and bone before cubing the meat. This allows us to assess how the blade works with large cuts and different textures.

We also score the comfort and cleanability of each knife. We note whether the handle is contoured or textured and whether food washes off easily, which is particularly important to avoid cross-contamination when working with raw meat. We also note whether the blade is flexible or rigid and straight or curved; these factors relate to performance as well as preference for many cooks.

✔️ Handle: The perfect knife for you is the one that feels comfortable, so it's ideal if you have the opportunity to hold the knife in person. But, regardless, know that boning meat can be slippery work, so you want a secure grip. Handles that have texture and/or contouring can give you a feeling of control, but we have found comfort with smooth handles as well. A pronounced bolster (where the blade meets the handle) and butt (the end of the knife) can also be helpful for some cooks.

✔️ Blade length: Most boning knives are between 5 and 7 inches. We found we liked the 6- to 7-inch range, as smaller blades can fall short when moving larger pieces of flesh from the bone.

✔️ Curved or straight: If you're more often separating large portions of meat from the bone, you might prefer a curved blade: It effectively increases the length of the blade and enables long, smooth cuts. However, for detailed work, such as removing bones or cutting through joints, a straight blade can be more effective. It is sturdy and easy to maneuver.

✔️ Flexibility: We liked knives with a little bit of flexibility (more on this below). Rigid knives made it harder to work around bones in tight spaces, but very flexible knives can make it difficult to align the blade over joints in some cases.

The key takeaway from our tests was that we recommend the middle ground: Very flexible boning knives can make it a little harder to keep your knife aligned (say, when butting up against the rib cage of a chicken). A rigid blade is strong and sturdy, providing a lot of control, but it can mean the loss of nuance with finer work in tight spaces.

We liked somewhat flexible blades: They allowed the most maneuverability while enabling precision cuts when you find the best position for cutting through a joint or removing meat. They also worked well to remove meat cleanly from curved areas, such as when removing breast meat from a chicken.

Boning knives and fillet knives are similar enough that some companies sell combo knives. But generally speaking, fillet knives are longer (up to 9 inches), more flexible (ideal for working with gentle bones and flesh), and narrower (in terms of both the blade thickness and the tip of the knife).

Boning knives tend to be thicker to stand up to larger cuts of meat, and they may taper less than fillet knives.

Sarah Gregory is a deputy editor with the Good Housekeeping Institute, and she tests a variety of products for the Kitchen Appliances and Innovation Lab. She's a trained cook and a former food editor and recipe developer. She developed the methodology for this test as well as the test of fish fillet knives.