For optimal hammer-ness I’d go for a good fruit tree wood- nice gnarly grain will put up with being smacked around a good bit. You don’t want your kitchen hammer splitting on you.
I love his videos.
I guess my rubber mallet is all wrong… It’s about 15 years old so there is that.
In the kitchen where I work we use something like this. Besides chiselling apart frozen foods, you might use it for tenderizing or flattening meat as in chicken cordon bleu.
What we’ve got too many hammers already? Looking around I’ve got ball-peen, claw, sledge, slide and MC.
Matthias is great! I love his YouTube videos.
Here’s an article about him, written in 2010:
When my frozen vegetables or chicken breasts are stuck together, I just hurl the bag dramatically onto the kitchen floor. Quite satisfying.
Psssh, that’s not a kitchen hammer.
Everyone needs a kitchen hammer
Agreed!
That’s not particularly good for your knives. Though it is useful when you’re working with big durable german style chef’s knives or cleavers. A standard wooden or rubber mallet or wood rolling pin works fine. But if you find yourself needing a mallet when cutting sweet potatoes its time to sharpen you’re knives.
0:12 “… so I use a sturdy knife…”
So no one else puts said frozen item in a Ziploc bag and covers it with cool-to-room-temp water, changing it out a few times over a few minutes?
What is a kitchen hammer?
Is this because Thor is a woman now? Not cool, guys!
A sharp knife will definitely help more than a hammer/mallet will. Not everyone will spend the time to properly sharpen a knife though (i know i haven’t), so being able to safely give a kitchen knife a good whack is not a bad idea.
Also, i would not recommend using a knife on a frozen chunk of meat unless you’re using a beefy cleaving knife.
I wouldn’t call giving a kitchen knife a good wack exactly safe, but there are circumstances when its needed. Apart from frozen food its helpful in things like prepping whole pigs for roasting or heavy butchering tasks. But this is basically why everyone should keep a big, heavy 10" beater on hand.
I’ve always wanted a nice cleaver, however at home i only cook vegetarian foods and it’d be more than overkill 
They are useful for coconuts and hard squashes. You can also get a nice meat cleaver (not chinese cleaver which is for vegitables) at your local Asian market or restaurant supply for like 5 bucks. Cleavers are not precision implements. And in terms of what typically equates to a ‘better’ knife all of those features are actually bad with a cleaver (harder steel, finer edge at lower angle etc).
