Yes and no. Steel is treated as the thing that makes a kitchen knife good, and as a lone variable it is overrated. Once a knife is made from a decent modern steel, the geometry of the blade and the quality of the heat treatment usually do more for how it feels in everyday cutting than the difference between one good steel and the next. Steel still sets what a knife can do, and a bad steel will sink a knife entirely. But the steel name on its own tells you far less than the marketing around it suggests.
Why steel gets talked about more than anything else
Steel is the easiest part of a knife to turn into a selling point, because it has a name, often an exotic one, and a set of numbers attached. The harder parts to sell are the parts we care about most: whether the blade is thin enough behind the edge, whether the hardening is repeatable, and whether those choices still make sense after a year in someone’s kitchen. Geometry and heat treatment are harder to see, harder to name and much harder to fake, so they get less attention even though they do more of the work.
It is a little like judging a car by its engine code: useful, but nowhere near enough to tell you how the thing drives. Steel is one part of a system, and rarely the part that decides whether the whole thing is any good.
What does knife steel actually decide?
Steel is not irrelevant. It sets the envelope the knife works within. Several things come down to the steel and how it is treated:
How hard the blade can usefully be hardened, which affects how fine an edge it can support and how it behaves in use. How well it resists corrosion and staining. How much edge life the steel can offer, when the edge geometry and use are sensible. And how readily it comes back on normal sharpening equipment.
Those are real and they matter. A genuinely poor steel, or one left too soft or poorly suited to the job, cannot hold a decent edge however well the knife is shaped, and no amount of geometry will rescue it. This is the “no” half of the answer. You cannot make a good knife without good steel. The point is not that steel does not matter. Steel sets the envelope, but it does not decide the finished knife on its own.
Why steel is overrated as a lone variable
The overrating comes from treating steel as the explanation for everything.
Two knives made from the same steel can behave completely differently, because the steel is only potential until the maker does something with it. The same bar of steel can become a superb knife or a poor one depending on how it is hardened, how it is ground, and how the edge is finished. When someone says a knife cuts well “because of the steel”, they are almost always crediting the steel for work done by the geometry and the heat treatment.
Above a certain point, the differences between good modern steels also shrink to the sort of margin most cooks will never notice. There is a band of sensible, well understood stainless steels that will do the job beautifully if the maker hardens them properly and builds the knife around them. Moving between them changes the knife far less than changing its shape would. The exotic name buys less than it appears to.
There is also a diminishing returns problem at the top. Chasing ever harder, more wear-resistant steels often buys some edge retention at the cost of toughness, ease of sharpening, and price. Past a point you may be paying more for a knife that is less forgiving in use and more of a nuisance to bring back to a good edge, which seems daft to us unless you have a sharpening fetish. Harder and more expensive is not the same as better.
How should you judge knife steel?
The useful order is roughly this. First, ask whether the maker has chosen a sound, proven knife steel and can harden it consistently. Then ask what they have built around it: the geometry, the edge and the intended use. A sound steel with excellent geometry will usually beat an exotic steel in a poorly made knife.
This is why we do not treat steel as the headline. We use a modern stainless that we know behaves well in our process and can be hardened consistently, and we put our effort into the parts that are harder to get right. If another steel gave a real gain in the finished knife, at the same cost and availability, we would use it. The loyalty is to the outcome, not the ingredient.
Which steel that is, and why it suits our knives, is its own article, linked below. The principle is that we picked a steel for how it behaves in a finished kitchen knife, not for how loudly it announces itself on a specification sheet.
The principle worth keeping
Steel is necessary and oversold at the same time. You cannot make a good knife without a good steel, but the steel name, on its own, is a weak way to judge a finished knife. If a maker leads with the steel and says little about how the blade is shaped, hardened and finished, they may be pointing at the easiest part of the knife to talk about, while staying quiet about the parts that matter more.