The Best Electric Carving Knives for Prime Rib

Nearly every complaint about carving prime rib comes from trying to cut slices straight off the standing roast, working the blade down between the ribs. It is slow, the blade wanders, and the slices come out uneven thicknesses.

Do it in two steps instead:

• Rest the roast properly first. Twenty to thirty minutes. Carving early pushes the juice onto the board and leaves the meat gray at the edges.
• Run a knife down the inside of the rib bones to release the whole eye in one piece. A manual boning or chef’s knife is better than an electric one for this part — you are following a bone, not slicing.
• Lay the boneless eye on the board and slice it with the electric knife to whatever thickness you like.
• Cut the rack of bones apart between the ribs and serve them. They are the best part and somebody at the table knows it.

Once you are slicing a boneless cylinder, an electric knife is genuinely good at this. Everything difficult about prime rib happened in the first step.

An electric knife works by running two serrated blades against each other, so it saws rather than slices. On turkey skin and on a well-done cut that is ideal — the teeth catch a tough surface and work through it without crushing what is underneath.

A medium-rare rib roast is the opposite material: soft, wet, and with no tough exterior to bite into once the crust is passed. A saw can leave a slightly torn face where a drawn edge would leave a clean one. On a plate, that is the difference between a slice that looks cut and one that looks pulled.

Three things reduce it to nothing much: rest the roast so it is firmer and drier before you start, use fine micro-serrated blades rather than coarse ones, and let the knife travel at its own pace without pressure. Do those and the result is entirely presentable — which is why this page exists rather than simply saying no.

Our basis for recommendation is on how we pick. Weighted for a rib roast:

• Control at low feed rates, weighted heaviest. A knife that snatches ruins a rare face.
• Blade fineness. Micro-serrations over coarse teeth on soft beef.
• Blade length against the diameter of a three- or four-bone roast.
• Whether a fork and board are included. A rib roast is heavy and needs holding.
• Sustained power through a thick fat cap.

We did not score any of them on cutting bone, because none of them do it and none of them should be asked to.

• Do not cut through rib bone. These are meat blades. Bone will chip the serrations and can bind the mechanism. Cut between the bones, not through them.
• Do not carve it standing on the ribs. Release the eye first. This is the single biggest improvement available.
• Do not push. Pressure is what tears a rare center. Guide and wait.
• Do not carve it hot out of the oven. Rest it, or you are serving the juice on the board instead of in the beef.
• Do not carve on a flat board. A rib roast releases a lot of juice; you want a well or a channel, or you will be wiping the counter.