The Best Cleavers for Chopping Through, Well, Anything

When most people hear the word “cleaver,” they probably imagine a cartoon chef chasing a small crab around a kitchen, splitting tables in half and wreaking havoc. While we don’t recommend bringing that sort of chaotic energy into your own kitchen, there’s a good chance bringing in a cleaver might be just what you need. There is more than one type of cleaver, however. Meat cleavers are hefty, blunt, and designed to crack through bone. Chinese cleavers, on the other hand, are thinner, sharper, and often used more like a chef’s knife for slicing, chopping, and dicing. You don’t want to mix them up, though. In fact, many knife sellers will add a caveat to their Chinese cleaver listings: Because they’re made with thinner, sharper edges, they tend to chip when attempting to chop through bone, which, if your notion of a cleaver is the aforementioned crab chasing, you might try to do.

• The best overall cleaver: Tojiro Fuji Chinese Cleaver
• The best Chinese cleaver: CCK Stainless Steel Chinese Cleaver
• The best meat cleaver: Lamson Heavy Duty Cleaver
• The best budget meat cleaver: Henckels Classic Cleaver

Knowing exactly what you want out of a cleaver is a great way to figure out which style might better fit what you are looking for. If you’ve already got a solid knife collection but want something to break down whole chickens on a regular basis, a meat cleaver will do you dandy. Looking for an adept slicer that’s great at dicing herbs? You’re likely in the market for a Chinese cleaver. In reality, most butchers don’t use cleavers very often and instead opt for boning knives and other thin, sharp blades that let them separate joints with finesse.

Though they both have separate use cases, the thing that bonds these cleavers together is a large, rectangular, wedge-shaped blade with a short handle and all of the weight-balance tilting toward the tip. That extra weight in the blade helps the cleaver do the work for you, be it butchering poultry or slicing bell pepper for a stir fry. We put both styles of cleavers to the test to figure out which cleavers were best in their category—and to see if there was one cleaver that could do both.

Tojiro Fuji Chinese Cleaver

$50

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The Tojiro Fuji cleaver is technically a Chinese-style cleaver. But it’s low-cost, sharp, and has the durability to act as a meat cleaver in a pinch. Taken together that makes it the best all-purpose cleaver we tested

What we love: Tojiro has regularly impressed us with the quality of their knives at affordable price points, and their take on a Chinese-style cleaver is no exception. Its compact blade is easy to wield while also being heavy enough to do most of the work for you. It also has a very sharp factory edge, which makes slicing, chopping, and mincing veggies a breeze. It performed great with delicate cuts on a cucumber while also slicing through tough sweet potatoes with very little effort. We also felt it was the only Chinese cleaver we tested that was sturdy enough to chop through bone-in chicken breast, which it did with aplomb. Its finer edge was able to slice through the chicken more easily than most meat cleavers we tested, meaning we didn’t have to chop very hard to get down to the breast bone.

Typically, Chinese cleavers are made from high-carbon stainless steel or carbon steel, which are great at holding an edge but also more brittle. With those cleavers, chopping through bone can chip the edge. Since Tojiro’s cleaver is made from stainless steel (not high-carbon steel), it’s softer than most of the high-end knives we recommend and not as prone to cracking. And since this cleaver is rarely listed for over $50, we think it’s a great kitchen workhorse that can pull double duty and won’t break your bank if you need to replace it eventually. If we had to buy just one cleaver, this is the one we’d choose—though we don’t recommend you try and chop a chicken thigh bone or a full pork shoulder in half with it.

What we’d leave: Because this cleaver is made with a lower-carbon stainless steel, you’ll have to sharpen it more often to retain its edge. It also lacks a full tang and is heavily weighted on the spine, meaning it’s very front-heavy. The thicker spine also gives this cleaver more of a wedge shape than most of the Chinese cleavers we tested, meaning it doesn’t make super delicate cuts quite as well.

CCK Stainless Steel Chinese Cleaver

$145

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The best Chinese cleaver we tested comes from a Hong Kong knife shop that has been making this style for over 100 years. It’s lightweight, comfortable to hold, and razor sharp.

What we love: While most traditional Chinese cleavers are made from easy-to-sharpen, rust-prone carbon steel, CCK offers models made from high-carbon stainless steel as well. When testing both, we actually found this high-carbon stainless version to be sharper out of the box and easier to use. Its thin blade made this cleaver extremely lightweight, while its overall size assisted in making quick, clean cuts. It sliced sweet potatoes, carrots, and cucumber neatly without any resistance or bruising, and we found the traditional barrel-style handle comfortable to hold.

We also liked how straight the edge was—Chinese cleavers are meant to cut using an up and down motion, a push cut, and rounded edges designed for rocking make it hard to use the entire length of the blade when cutting. This makes it much easier to julienne vegetables like carrots or cucumbers, or to slice strands of dough to make noodles. We also think that makes it unique enough to add to your knife collection, even if you have a killer chef’s knife you love. Who knows? This CCK Chinese cleaver could just take over as your go-to daily knife.

What we’d leave: One thing that’s tricky about a cleaver is the sheer size of the blade. While we appreciated how easily it sliced larger vegetables, it took some adjustment to find the right grip and cutting motion, since your hand is much further away from the food you’re cutting than with a chef’s knife. The wooden handle also has nooks and crannies for water to collect in during washing, so making sure the knife was completely dry was a chore.

Jesse Raub

Lamson Heavy Duty Cleaver

If you need a meat cleaver, our favorite model from testing is made by Lamson. Even though it has “heavy duty” in its model name, we found this cleaver fairly lightweight—and better for it.

What we love: Meat cleavers have a job to do: cleave meat. While most models we tested had thicker blades with a blunter edge to protect them from chipping, rolling, or denting, this model from Lamson was on the thinner side. Its lighter weight made it easier to wield, but the thinner blade also cut through the chicken breast more easily than its competition, which made it easier to then cut through bone. Most other cleavers needed some heavy hacking to get the job done, but since the Lamson’s blade easily sliced through the meat, its proximity to the bone meant all we needed was to lean lightly into the spine to finish the cut.

The blade’s sharpness isn’t on par with a high-end chef’s knife—it’s still a cleaver, after all—but the thinner blade did mean that the Lamson could slice sweet potatoes and squash better than the competition. Most cleavers would split the sweet potato before they sliced through, while this cleaver could actually make a proper cut. If you tend to break down whole chickens or larger pieces of meat, you’ll find the Lamson cleaver is a great option.

What we’d leave: There’s a bit of an elephant in the room when it comes to meat cleavers—and that’s their limited functionality. While cleavers are great for splitting a chicken breast, their blades tend to be too thick to be practical for much else. Yes, the Lamson can slice sweet potato, but I’d sooner pick up a paring knife for that task than any of the cleavers we tested (and that’s saying something). It also wasn’t able to break down the butternut squash. Still, “meat” is in the name of a “meat cleaver,” and for that function, we thought the Lamson was great.

Henckels Classic Cleaver

$70

Amazon

Meat cleavers are basically unitaskers, and this model from Henckels does the job well for a reasonable price.

What we love: The best thing about this cleaver is its price. When we realized that most of the meat cleavers we tested were not going to chop vegetables well, we wanted to find a great budget option that would fit well in any kitchen. The Henckels cleaver did just that—it cleanly broke down the chicken breast into multiple sections easily, and performed just as well as cleavers that were two to three times the price. It has a solid weight without being too heavy, a comfortable handle, and its smaller blade was easy to control without sacrificing chopping power. If you occasionally need a tool to break down a bigger piece of meat, we think this Henckels meat cleaver is the best option without overspending.

What we’d leave: This cleaver’s blunt edge won’t crack when chopping bone, but it’s not well-suited for slicing. Like all the meat cleavers we tested, this model has limited functionality outside of cutting meat, so if you choose it, prepare to bring a unitasker into your knife drawer rather than a daily driver. Still, if you roast a lot of whole chickens, there’s no better tool for breaking them down into individual pieces.

When looking for a meat cleaver, it’s important to remember that these are basically designed for just a few jobs: break down large cuts of meat, separate joints, and chop through bone. That means you need a sharp—but not too sharp—edge, a hefty weighted blade, and one that’s easy to clean.

These cleavers all performed well in our tests, but just didn’t live up to our top picks—sometimes simply because of their price. If you’re particular or are looking for a specific blade shape or blade material, we think these cleavers would also suit most home cooks very well.

Shun Chinese Cleaver

$260

Amazon

This cleaver was sharp as all get out and had a comfortable handle with an integrated bolster, too. It chopped and sliced through every vegetable we threw at it, and the classic Shun Damascus pattern is beautiful across the tall, broad cleaver blade. While we loved slicing and chopping with this model, the biggest hitch is that the blade is a little tall, making it harder to control, and it was also expensive. If you’re a Shun collector, we think this Chinese cleaver is a really great option—we just liked our top picks a little more.

CCK Carbon Steel Chinese Cleaver

$139

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This CCK Chinese cleaver is identical to the one we chose as our top pick, except for one key detail: it’s a carbon steel knife. Carbon steel sharpens and holds an edge incredibly well, but it’s also prone to discoloration, corrosion, and rust. In our tests, we actually found it to be less sharp out of the box than the high-carbon stainless steel version, but otherwise we liked its performance. And because it’s made from carbon steel, we also know it would sharpen up easily with a whetstone (note that, because they have wider blades, cleavers may not work with electric knife sharpeners).

Wüsthof Cleaver

$125

Amazon

We liked this cleaver a lot, but there was one problem—it didn’t meaningfully outperform the Henckels model, and it’s twice the price. In our tests, it was sharp enough to easily cut chicken skin while heavy enough to break through bone. It’s also a bit on the heavy side, lending a bit more force to each whack without requiring extra effort for the user. The build quality was top notch, and if you fancy yourself a home butcher, it might be worth investing a bit more into the meat cleaver you choose. If not, go either of our top picks, both of which were cheaper, will serve you well.

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