What is this freaky knife for?

Question

It's long and skinny, like a bread knife. It doesn't show well in the photo, but there's a tiny fine serration on the edge of one of those pointy things…? I've asked the 2 chefs I know, and neither one of them even had a guess!

Answer 1

It's a serrated carving knife. In fact, that particular knife is a Kitchen + Home Carving Bread Knife – 8” Sharp Stainless Steel Serrated All Purpose Kitchen Knife available from WalMart for $13USD.

The forked point is for skewering and serving slices of meat after you've carved them (see photo on listing).

If the knife had been much smaller, it could have been a tomato knife. It still could be, if you have really big tomatoes.

Answer 2

It's a frozen food knife actually. I never understood what the "forky" tip is for. Just google for "frozen food knife" and you will find more examples that look like this.

Quote from https://www.recipetips.com/glossary-term/t--38022/frozen-food-knife.asp:

"Built to cut through hard to semi-hard substances, this utensil is manufactured for specialty tasks. A common cutting blade used for this type of knife is the saw- toothed blade which may be called a saw-and-racker tooth or a coarse saw tooth blade. A saw-toothed blade has tiny but coarse teeth that are closely aligned and formed to cut through materials such as metal surfaces. The saw-and-racker blade contains an alternating blade construction with each set of double toothed blade extensions separated by a curved serrated blade surface. Typically, the Frozen Food Knife blade is made of a rigid steel that can withstand very cold temperatures and the heavier than normal cutting pressure required to cut through ice hard substances, such as frozen foods. Also the back and forth motion required for cutting hardened objects causes non-rigid blades to bend or quiver. Simple tasks such as cutting apart a small carton of frozen peas can be easily accomplished with this knife or harder tasks of cutting larger blocks of frozen vegetables and breads can be undertaken with a knife built to cut frozen foods."

Answer 3

I have the same type of knife, and we've always used it to slice/cut bread! It works surpringly well as most "serrated" knifes I've used for bread, are not usually sharp, but these serrations are sharp, which would work well for meat. I've used it for frozen food and it's okay, but I rarely do this.

I always thought that the tips where meant to serve meat, but whenever we cooked a big piece of meat to be sliced afterwards (like carne a la sal), we (my house) use a slicing knife (jamonero knife), the one that you would use to cut jamón. Maybe in other countries they use the serrated sharpy knife!