Best Dishwasher Safe Knife Set Reviews & Buying Guide

Cleaning up after dinner is a universally despised chore. You’ve made the meal, you enjoyed it, it’s gone, and you’re left with handwashing those knives of yours because you know they’re going to rust if you put them in the dishwasher. You need one of our best dishwasher safe knife set options!

Dishwasher safe knives come to the rescue. Rust-resistant, corrosion-fighting knives that don’t compromise on the materials. You love your stainless steel knives and the way they cut, so you shouldn’t have to make a trade-off.

Best Dishwasher Safe Knife Set Reviews

Today, we’ve found the five best dishwasher safe knives so that you can get back to cooking the way you want to with no holds barred. Let’s take a look at which knife sets are going to grace your kitchen.

KitchenAid Classic Forged 14-Piece Stainless Steel Cutlery Set

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KitchenAid is one of those brands that simply rule the kitchen, and for good reason: they know what works. They know exactly what we want to see. This knife set comes in an attractive bamboo cutting block, which is designed to be forgiving if you knick the edges when depositing your knives after cleaning. It was an easy top pick for our best dishwasher safe knife set list.

While being completely dishwasher safe is a great feature, these knives also offer excellent durability. Made from German stainless steel with a 17° cutting angle, you’ll feel power in your hands every time you prepare food. This is the sharpest angle that the casual home cook can benefit from without making your knives high-maintenance.

To maintain that edge, you have an integrated knife sharpener built right into that bamboo block. It’s preset to a 17° cutting angle, so you just have to drag the blade through the sharpener to restore its razor-sharp edge.

While it’s not something you think about at first, weight distribution in each knife is extremely important. These handles have been weighed down to the gram to provide good stability and weight balance from the tip of the blade to the base of the hilt, so you don’t feel like the knife is leaning forward when holding it at any point.

The scissors included in this block are a bit dull out of the package, which will give you an opportunity to put that #600 grit sharpener to work. The only thing you have to be careful of with the bamboo block is geting it wet, since the top of not sealed off. Other than that, it’s a fantastic and affordable block that will last you for over a decade.

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Wanbasion 16-Piece Kitchen Knife Set

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These dishwasher safe knife sets have an excellent sharp edge and an FDA-certified design, and above all else, they come at a reasonable price that directly competes with KitchenAid’s knife block we just saw above.

Full disclosure: this is a 16-piece kit, not a 16-knife kit. You get a peeler, scissors, and a two-channel knife sharpener included in the kit. Either way, it’s still plenty of knives for this price that completely justifies the cost.

Included in this set, you get six steak knives to restock your supply, as well as one of the best budget-friendly 8” bread knives we’ve ever seen. That two-channel sharpener isn’t the last sharpener you will ever need, but it’s good enough to get the job done for a couple of years without needing to do external sharpening.

The biggest concern with colored steel knives is paint chipping. The blue on these knives isn’t just a coating; it’s integrated into the steel, so you won’t have paint flecks scraping off during use. The darker blue does brighten to a sharp cyan color during sharpening, which helps identify the edge-side of the knife when you retrieve it from the block.

Speaking of the block, this is where Wanbasion really dropped the ball. It’s made of acrylic, and it displays most of your knives in a horizontal, fan-spread fashion. That doesn’t make it super compact to save countertop space (something that we could all use more of), and the acrylic scratches easily. It won’t take long before this knife storage block looks a bit worse for wear.

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Cuisinart 15-Piece Stainless Steel Hollow Handle Cutlery Block

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Cuisinart is another top name in this space, and their dishwasher safe cutlery set comes with just about everything you could ever need in your kitchen. It’s a 15-piece kit, and while that does include the kitchen scissors in your knife block, you still get plenty of knives to master everything that comes across your counters.

High carbon stainless steel delivers a more consistent sharp edge for longer periods of time than uncoated or untreated stainless steel. Couple that with the excellent grip on the stainless handles, and you have a well-balanced, 19° cutting angle set of knives. One of the best things about this block is that it’s surprisingly affordable, especially for a brand like this.

Let’s talk about that knife block. It’s solid, it’s weighted, but aesthetically it’s not going to hold on for too long. One miss when you deposit your knives back into the block, and the black paint will come right off. It looks good for now, just be sure to be careful with it.

One thing that we don’t see in most of these other sets is that you get a honing rod included with your block, saving you from making an additional purchase. Cuisinart extends a lifetime warranty with these knives, but it’s important to know it doesn’t include the actual storage block. Dishwasher safe, made of stainless steel, and sharp as a tack—what more could you want?

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Home Hero 8-Piece Dishwasher Safe Steak Knife Set

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Out of all knife sets dishwasher safe bundles have the hardest challenges to face, especially when they stick to stainless steel. Thankfully, this brand knocked it out of the park by keeping everything well-protected and corrosion resistant.

These are the best dishwasher safe steak knives, so if you’re just looking to replenish your steak knife stock, you’ve just found the holy grail. At a relatively inexpensive price, you get eight steak knives with deep serrated edges.

During use, you won’t get any of that black carbon coloring on your food despite the dark coating color. The only time this is an issue is during sharpening, when some of the carbon colorin will come off. Wipe down these knives after you sharpen them before you put them to food.

One of the greatest aspects of this set of knives has to be the tactile grip on the handles. The handles are a bit lighter than the head of each knife, so you won’t have that same level of weight distribution that we were hoping for, but the difference isn’t too noticeable.

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13-Piece Colored Stainless Steel Knife Set

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This dishwasher safe knife block set comes with a few picadillos to look out for. For one, it’s a 13-piece set, but half of those pieces are the casings for each knife. They help protect your blades when they’re in the draw, which is excellent, but the cost per knife is a bit higher than some of these other bundles.

Thankfully, the value you’re getting in these knives is off the charts. With a 20° cutting angle, they’re sharper than they look, and not as high maintenance as Japanese kitchen knives. Don’t let the fun colors distract you from just how tough they can be.

You get all of your utility knives here, and one steak knife. The only thing this kit is really lacking is more steak knives, but for kitchen use, they work well enough. The sharp stainless steel doesn’t have a coating, so during sharpening you won’t have any flecks of black carbon to clean up or anything like that.

While the handles are great and have a good grip to them, they’re easy to scratch. If you wanted to clean these by hand, they’ll knock around in the sink and develop small divots. In the dishwasher, just be sure to keep them away from other objects to avoid this (as well as hitting the blades). Sadly, there is no warranty here, so after making the purchase you’re on your own. While it’s always possibly to get a bum set, the knives we received came in perfect condition, and we don’t anticipate a warranty will be necessary.

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Best Dishwasher Safe Knife Set Buying Guide and FAQ

More questions about the best dishwasher safe knife set options above? We got you covered below.

What to Look for in Dishwasher Safe Knives

Dishwasher safe kitchen knives come with a few key features that differ from brand to brand. We’re going to take a look at the primary features you should be on the lookout for.

Knife Material

This often comes down to stainless steel versus ceramic. Stainless steel is the choice that many chefs go with, while ceramic’s benefits are more suited for casual cooking in the home kitchen. For some context, you’ll notice that ceramic blades are usually smaller than stainless steel blades, so if having the level of control over a larger knife is important to you, stainless steel is the way to go. The benefit to ceramic is that it’s inexpensive compared to stainless steel.

Integrated Sharpener

This is a feature we see in our top knife block from KitchenAid, although this isn’t exactly uncommon to find in other blocks as well. Integrated sharpeners are nice additions that help you cut down on other kitchen gadget costs, and while integrated sharpeners do have their issues, they work well enough for a few years to help you keep your knives nice and sharp.

Number of Knives

Are you running home catering, or just cooking for your family of four? We don’t all need a high quantity of knives in our day-to-day cooking, but the reason you buy a knife block anyway is the options. You have backup knives to help you out if one knife ends up breaking, or if one is dull and you don’t feel like sharpening it right now; you can just switch them out. The utility and options are always good to have, and if you ever decide to co-op cook with a spouse or friend, those additional knives will come in handy.

Cutting Angle

Cutting angles differ depending on the type of knife. Traditionally, Asian-inspired knives have extremely sharp cutting angles, sometimes from 10° up to 15°, which is extremely narrow and quite literally razor-sharp. European and American knives tend to rest somewhere between 17° and 23° cutting angles for higher quality knives, and anywhere from 20Ü to 40° angles for standard run-of-the-mill knives.

This is a good time to find out what matters most to you in a dishwasher safe knife set. Since every set on this list is dishwasher safe, we left that out of the list above for obvious reasons.

How Are Stainless Steel Knives Dishwasher Safe?

Stainless steel has chromium built into the alloy that helps prevent rusting, which is one of the reasons that it’s the most popular material in kitchens across America (beyond just knives). Chromium helps, but during abrasive dishwasher cycles, something else also helps you out.

The best dishwasher safe knives also have a layer of carbon on the exterior of the steel to prevent corrosion. The only issue here is that after a few years, stainless steel won’t hold up to your dishwasher nearly as well before you’ll remove layers of carbon through sharpening.

Dishwasher safe knives are dishwasher safe for now, but unless you get them carbon coated again in the future, you might run into issues. Depending on how much you use your knife, you’ll be sharpening it every six to twelve months, so after about two years you might want to switch to handwashing.

This is the only major reason that someone would choose ceramic knives over stainless steel, since those knives are rust resistant because of the base material, not because of a coating. While it is possible for stainless steel knives to include high levels of carbon, it’s usually coated in lower-tier knives.

How Do I Sharpen My Dishwasher Safe Knives?

It all depends on your angle. Your dishwasher safe knife can either be run through an electric knife sharpener, or you can go with a sharpening block. Electric sharpeners need to be set to a specific angle to sharpen your knife, while blocks come in different grits for different levels of fineness.

Traditionally, you’ll use a sharpening block or manual knife sharpener for Asian-inspired knives that have more narrow cutting angles. This is especially true if they’re straight cut and do not have a traditional bevel along the edge. Bevels of 20° to 40° angles work best in electric sharpeners.

Why Use a Honing Rod?

Honing your knife is just as important as sharpening it. One without the other just doesn’t work. If you hone a dull knife, it doesn’t do much, and if you sharpen a knife without honing it, you’re not going to see consistent results.

When you sharpen a knife, you’re grating away its primary material. While that sounds like something minor, it’s putting physical stress on the knife edge and reshaping it. None of us have laser precision, so we might make the bevel more narrow than it previously was, or we might not sharpen our knives appropriately.

A honing rod realigns a sharp knife. If you look under a microscope, a newly sharpened knife is fairly wonky-looking. It’s not in a linear straight path despite looking that way. A honing rod helps realign that metal and ensure the edge is straight. You don’t have to use your honing rod for all too long after sharpening your knives, but it is a crucial step.

What Are the Risks of Using a Dishwasher With Knives?

Well, you do have a few problems that you should be on the lookout for. These can be make-or-break deals for some people.

Discoloration: Excessive heat over the entire knife can cause discoloration. This is only an issue with stainless steel knives, and depending on the grade of stainless steel used, the results will vary. Detergent use doesn’t affect color, but depending on how hot your dishwasher gets, you’ll start to notice it.

Accidental Dulling: Putting your knives in the dishwasher runs the risk of dulling them. While some claim it’s from detergent use, it’s really just from dishwashers being clunky and items knocking into one another. During aggressive wash cycle,s your knives can move around and scrape against pots or pans in the dishwasher, dulling the knife.

Trapped Water: If the blade and handle don’t have a good marriage, water get seep between them and stagnate. This will lead to bacterial building in your knife handle. Even if your knives are dcry coming out of the dishwasher, it’s important to lay them down on a cloth or paper towel to get any additional moisture out before storing them in the butcher’s block again.

It’s all a matter of being careful and knowing what you’re doing. Dishwasher safe knives have their major advantages, but a few little picadillos to be on the lookout for.

Are Ceramic Knives Better Than Stainless Steel?

Dishwasher safe knives come in multiple materials, and one of the most popular is ceramic. It can’t rust, so even if you leave it in the dishwasher between a wash and dry cycle, water buildup isn’t going to cause it any problems.

Ceramic knives are great, but not as reliable as stainless steel. They need to be sharpened more often, and while they do provide a nice sharp edge when that’s done, there’s a different weight to them. When you’re used to handling a heavy stainless steel knife, switching over to ceramic can be a bit of a challenge.

Ceramic knives good, viable options that just come with a bit of a learning curve if you’re not used to them. They’re forgiving, although they might not last as long as your stainless steel knives (even so, they’re still rated to last for years, so you have nothing to worry about if you do decide on ceramic knives).

Dishwasher Safe Knives Make Life Easier

Nothing makes life easier than simply throwing your knives right in the dishwasher. The options above for the best dishwasher safe knife set will provide you with the certainty that you won’t retrieve them to find rust, damage, or additional wear and tear on them.

These are some of the best dishwasher safe knives out there that still let you use stainless steel instead of ceramic. Make cleanup easier, and ensure your knives last longer.