Zyliss Signature Cheese Cleaver: Swiss steel made for hard cheese

What it is

The Zyliss Signature Cheese Cleaver is a dedicated cheese knife from Zyliss, a kitchenware brand whose Swiss entity is based in Zurich. It sits in the brand’s Cheese Knife category, built for one job: slicing and cubing hard cheese. It is designed for a wedge of Gruyère or a chunk of Parmesan that needs to be broken down into slices or cubes without turning into crumbs.

It comes as a single design: a wide stainless steel blade paired with a stainless steel handle finished with a sandblasted texture. This is a knife for people who regularly serve hard or semi-hard cheese, whether for a family meal, a raclette-and-cheese evening, or an apéro board, and who find a standard kitchen knife awkward or inefficient on dense, crumbly cheese.

Why it exists

Hard cheese is notoriously difficult to cut cleanly. A narrow or thin blade tends to stick, crack the cheese unevenly, or leave crumbly fragments behind instead of a clean slice or cube. According to Zyliss, this is precisely the problem the Signature Cheese Cleaver is meant to solve: a wide blade that spreads pressure evenly across the cheese as it cuts, rather than concentrating force on a narrow edge.

The brand also points to a second, more practical issue: many hard cheeses come with a rind or a waxed crust that needs to be pierced or scored before the cheese can be cut into properly. That is why the design does not stop at the blade’s width — the tip plays a role too, as detailed below.

What matters

Blade length and width. The blade measures 10 cm (99 mm / 3.9 in) in length. On a cheese cleaver, length matters less than width and shape: a shorter, wider blade like this one is built to come down through a block of cheese in one motion rather than sawing back and forth, which is what tends to cause crumbling on dense cheeses.

Material: stainless steel. Both the blade and the handle are stainless steel. Zyliss states that stainless steel resists rust and staining, which matters for a tool that will regularly come into contact with cheese oils, salt, and moisture, and that may sit in a drying rack or a drawer between uses.

Sandblasted handle finish. The handle is stainless steel with a sandblasted finish rather than a polished or coated surface. A sandblasted texture is typically chosen to improve grip, particularly when hands are damp or slightly greasy from handling cheese — a realistic scenario at a cheese board or during meal preparation.

Pointed blade tip. The tip of the blade is pointed, specifically to pierce cheese rinds. This is a detail that separates a cheese cleaver from a generic kitchen knife: the tip lets the same tool score or puncture a waxed or hardened rind before the wide part of the blade takes over to slice or cube the interior.

Five-year manufacturer warranty. Zyliss backs this knife with a 5-year warranty. For a single-piece stainless steel tool with no moving parts, a multi-year warranty is a signal of how the brand expects the product to hold up over repeated use and dishwasher cycles.

Day to day

The Signature Cheese Cleaver is dishwasher safe, so day-to-day care does not require hand-washing or special drying steps — it can go through a normal dishwasher cycle along with the rest of the kitchenware. This is worth noting because not every knife with a decorative or textured handle tolerates dishwasher use well; this one does.

In use, the intended sequence follows the design itself: the pointed tip is used first if the cheese has a rind that needs piercing or scoring, and then the wide blade is brought down to slice or cube the cheese underneath.

Technical specifications

Characteristic	Value
Product reference	E980342
EAN/UPC code	5011268802829
Overall dimensions	19.3 x 4.9 x 8 cm
Blade length	10 cm (99 mm / 3.9 in)
Manufacturer warranty	5 years

What the brand says

Zyliss states that the wide blade allows for even pressure across the cheese, which the brand says reduces crumbling compared with cutting hard cheese using a narrower blade. Zyliss also claims that the stainless steel construction resists rust and staining over time, a claim tied directly to the choice of material for both blade and handle.

The brand presents this cleaver as particularly suited to specific hard and semi-hard cheeses: Parmesan, Pecorino Romano, Gruyère and Comté. These are all cheeses known for their density and, in the case of Parmesan and Pecorino Romano, their tendency to flake or crumble under an unsuitable blade — which lines up with the problem Zyliss says the wide-blade design is meant to address.