Budget

You don’t need to spend two hundred dollars on a chef’s knife to cook well. The $70 knife in the right hands outperforms the $300 knife in the wrong ones — and there are excellent blades available under $100 if you know where to look. The hard part is filtering out the dozens of cheap stamped blades with terrible edge geometry that dull after one meal prep session. We tested seven chef’s knives under $100 across multiple styles: Western, Japanese-style gyuto, Chinese cleaver, and nakiri. Each was used for three weeks of daily cooking — dicing onions, slicing raw chicken, mincing herbs, and breaking down the occasional squash. Here’s what we found. ...

There’s nothing quite like waking up to the smell of fresh-baked bread. And with a bread maker, you don’t need to be a master baker to make it happen. Dump in the ingredients, press a button, and let the machine do the work. But you don’t need to spend $200+ to get a great bread maker. In 2025, several models under $100 deliver excellent results. We’ve tested and compared the top contenders to help you pick the right one. ...