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The Best Oyster Knives

Give a cook an oyster, and they eat for a moment. Hand a cook a good oyster knife, and they eat for a lifetime.

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Published Mar. 20, 2024.

The Best Oyster Knives
See Everything We Tested

What You Need To Know

The best oyster knives make it easy to open oysters of any size, sporting relatively short, narrow blades with pointy tips and grippy handles. Our favorite is the R. Murphy Knives New Haven Shucker. Its light weight and recycled plastic handle make it comfortable for hands of all sizes to hold, and it has an upturned tip that provides extra leverage for popping open oysters. We also love the F. Dick Oyster Opener. It’s got a thin, pointy, extremely sharp blade that experienced shuckers found especially adept at opening and cutting free oysters. The OXO Good Grips Oyster Knife is our Best Buy. It’s got a slightly longer blade and a thicker handle that some users felt wasn’t quite as comfortable to grip as our top choice, but it did a great job of shucking oysters of all sizes. 

What You Need to Know

You could wait for a night out to enjoy the briny pleasure of a fresh, raw oyster. But there are benefits to learning to shuck oysters yourself. As writer and oyster evangelist Rowan Jacobsen told us: “Suddenly, your world opens up. You’re no longer at the mercy of restaurants charging you $4 or $5 each, and you get to be the life of the party. A little investment in time gives you the opportunity to have lots of great experiences and to save a bunch of money.” 

If you’re careful, you could use a butter knife or even a screwdriver to shuck an oyster. But a dedicated oyster knife makes it a lot easier to pop open an oyster shell without making a mess or mauling the mollusk inside.

There are many types of oyster knives: Boston, New Haven, Galveston, Providence, West Coast, French, and various Japanese options, among others. In theory, the name of the knife clues you in to the type of oyster it’s best at shucking. Big Gulf oysters benefit from a Galveston knife. For smaller oysters from Duxbury, Massachusetts, grab a Duxbury knife. But it’s not practical for most of us to have a knife for every type of oyster we might encounter. To find the best all-purpose option, we tested a variety of knives, using them to shuck oysters both tiny and extra-large, West Coast and East Coast, and everything in between. 

The good news? While certain knives did work better on certain types of oysters, all the knives we tested can be used to shuck any oyster if you have a little experience. While the personal preferences of our testers varied a bit, we found that a few general characteristics made some knives more durable, more comfortable to hold, and better at shucking a wide range of oysters. 

What to Look For

  • A Pointy Tip: Knives with pointy tips easily slipped into even the tightest oyster hinges. While blades with broader, rounder...

Everything We Tested

Good : 3 stars out of 3.Fair : 2 stars out of 3.Poor : 1 stars out of 3.
*All products reviewed by America’s Test Kitchen are independently chosen, researched, and reviewed by our editors. We buy products for testing at retail locations and do not accept unsolicited samples for testing. We list suggested sources for recommended products as a convenience to our readers but do not endorse specific retailers. When you choose to purchase our editorial recommendations from the links we provide, we may earn an affiliate commission. Prices are subject to change.
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Reviews you can trust

Reviews you can trust

The mission of America’s Test Kitchen Reviews is to find the best equipment and ingredients for the home cook through rigorous, hands-on testing. We stand behind our winners so much that we even put our seal of approval on them.

Miye Bromberg

Miye Bromberg

Miye is a senior editor for ATK Reviews. She covers booze, blades, and gadgets of questionable value.

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