Why this knive earns its place
Salad prep hides its volume. A case of leaf, boxes of tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and a fruit platter list on top of it all has to be through the bench before anyone thinks about service. An 8.5in blade is what makes that a run rather than a grind: enough length to take a whole head in two or three passes, enough to slice across a full tray of tomatoes without lifting the tip off the board, and enough weight along the blade that the rocking cut does the work instead of your shoulder. Heel to tip, hand steady, produce moving under it.
Green is conventionally the salad and fruit colour in UK coded sets, and on this section the coding is not a formality. Nothing on the board gets a further cook step, so the blade that touches it must never have been on raw protein — the exact discipline Prepara's coded range exists to support. Sharpness is the other half. A dull cook's knife crushes tomato flesh rather than parting it and bruises leaf at the cut, and bruised salad weeps in the bowl well before it reaches a table. Steel it at the start of the session and again when it stops biting. Wash and dry it when you finish rather than leaving it standing in water, and store it edge-protected.
