Western cooks often mistake cleavers for butcher-only tools. But in Chinese kitchens, they're actually lightweight, versatile workhorses – precision knives that handle everything from dicing herbs to breaking down proteins, with different sizes for different jobs.

This is a very versatile knife – not only for chopping meat, but also vegetables, and the more you use it, the more it adapts to your hand and can be used for almost anything.

Cutting large, tough-skinned vegetables like pumpkins can be challenging. A cleaver’s weight and wide blade make it ideal for this task, efficiently handling watermelons, daikon radishes, and other dense produce.

Technique tip: Wedge the cleaver into the vegetable, then gently tap its spine with a mallet to split it cleanly in half. This creates perfect halves for seeding and roasting. If no mallet is available, carefully use the heel of your hand to apply pressure—always working slowly and with extreme caution.

While cleavers are frequently marketed for cutting bone-in meats, their use on dense bones—especially from larger animals—is not recommended. Repeated impact against hard surfaces risks damaging the blade, causing premature dulling, nicks, or edge deformation.

Instead, the cleaver excels at processing boneless proteins. Its weight and flat blade allow for:

• Efficient slicing of meat into uniform strips

• Cutting multiple strips simultaneously into precise cubes

• Finely mincing meat to tartare-grade consistency

Transferring ingredients—particularly small items—from cutting board to cookware risks spills and inefficiency. Avoid moving the entire board or using additional bowls by employing the cleaver's broad blade surface as a transfer tool.

The expansive face efficiently collects and transports chopped ingredients directly to pans or containers. For safety and edge preservation, always use the spine (back) of the blade when scraping. This prevents both blade dulling and accidental contact with the sharp edge.