In this review
The first real test I put these through was a whole chicken on a Tuesday night. My partner was out, the oven was already at 450, and I had about twenty minutes to spatchcock the bird before the potatoes overcooked. I grabbed the KitchenAid All Purpose Kitchen Shears out of the drawer, found the backbone with my thumb, and started cutting.
Thirty seconds. Both sides of the spine, clean through the ribs, no wrestling.
For an eight-dollar pair of scissors, that is more than I was expecting.
KitchenAid All Purpose Kitchen Shears
An 8.72-inch pair of stainless steel kitchen shears with micro-serrated blades, a soft-grip handle, and a plastic blade sheath. Cheap, widely available, and good enough to be the only pair in your drawer for most home cooking.
Rating breakdown
What these do well on a normal weeknight
Most kitchen tasks do not need surgical shears. They need a blade that bites cleanly through chicken skin, cardboard clamshells, a block of pancetta, twine around a pork shoulder, pizza for a kid who cannot wait. These handle all of that.
The micro-serrations on the blade are the reason. Smooth-edged shears slide on chicken skin. You end up sawing, and on a wet bird with greasy fingers you sometimes slip. The tiny teeth on these grab the skin and cut through it in one motion. Same trick on a ripe tomato if you ever need to halve one and cannot be bothered to wash a knife.
Blades are thicker than I was expecting at this price. You feel it when you cut through something stiff. I went after a rotisserie chicken last weekend, separated a whole leg quarter from the breast, and the shears did not flex in my hand. Cheaper shears bow under that pressure and the cut wanders. These stayed tracking straight.
The handle surprised me. Soft-grip rubber, the kind that usually looks good on the box and feels cheap after a month. I have been using mine about four times a week since late January and the coating still feels grippy, even with wet hands. Not slick, not gummy. It sits in the web of my palm at the right angle for a pushing cut, which is what you want on bone.
The honest complaints
Now the part most reviews skip.
These do not come apart. The blades are riveted at a fixed pivot. You cannot separate them for a real scrub after you cut raw chicken. You can rinse, you can soak, you can run them through the dishwasher, but you cannot get at the hinge with a toothbrush the way you can with an OXO Good Grips Kitchen & Herb Scissors or a Joyce Chen Original Unlimited.
For herbs and pizza and packaging, this is fine. For poultry, it matters. I hand-wash mine immediately after raw chicken, spray the hinge with hot water and a drop of dish soap, open and close them under the stream about ten times, and let them air-dry standing open. That is my routine. If you are the kind of cook who wants to toss shears in the dishwasher and trust that the hinge comes out clean, these are not the ones.
Speaking of the dishwasher. The box says dishwasher safe. The manufacturer also recommends hand washing. Those two sentences live on the same piece of cardboard, and they are both true in the way marketing is true. The blades will survive the dishwasher. The soft-grip coating starts looking tired after a few months of hot cycles. I have a second pair I bought for my mother and she runs hers through the dishwasher every time. Six months in, the handle rubber is matte and slightly sticky in one spot. Mine, hand-washed, still looks new.
The plastic sheath is plastic. It does its job. It snaps on, stays put in a drawer, protects the blades from the butter knife rattling around next to them. It is not a premium sheath. It is a piece of molded plastic that adds about a dollar of value to an eight-dollar product, and that math works out.
The failure test
I wanted to find where these break. So I started cutting things that are not really their job.
Frozen pizza, straight out of the oven, still too hot to touch. The shears cut through the crust, through the cheese, through the pepperoni. No complaint there, that is actually what shears are for.
A roll of foot-thick parchment paper, doubled over. Clean cut, straight line.
The stem of a butternut squash. This is where they told me no. The shears opened, the stem is too thick, the blades just spread around it. You need a knife for that, and I knew I was being unfair. But I wanted to see.
Chicken thigh bones. Small ones, from a deboning job. The shears cut through them, but you can feel the metal working. I would not do this every day. A pair of dedicated poultry shears like the WUSTHOF Come-Apart or even the Gerber Gator are built for that kind of abuse. These will do it occasionally without complaining, but they are not poultry shears. They are all-purpose shears, and the difference shows up at the edges.
After about twelve weeks of daily use I checked the edge against a sheet of printer paper. They still cut it clean. Not razor-clean the way they did out of the box, but clean enough. I am guessing the edge holds for another year at this pace before it gets dull enough to bother me, and at eight dollars, I am fine buying a new pair when it does.
Who should buy these, who should skip them
Buy these if you want one cheap pair of shears that does ninety percent of what home cooking asks of shears. Buy these if you already own a decent chef’s knife and you just need something to cut open pasta bags and spatchcock a bird once a month. Buy these if your current shears are the free-with-knife-block ones from 2012 and you have been snipping herbs with a dull pair for too long.
Skip these if you break down whole chickens weekly or process poultry for meal prep. Get the OXO Good Grips with the take-apart hinge and pay the extra ten dollars. You will clean them properly and they will last longer because of it.
Skip these if you want an heirloom tool. These are not that. They are a consumable at this price point, and the marketing does not pretend otherwise.
Skip these if you are shopping for someone who will absolutely put them in the dishwasher every time. Either get them the take-apart OXO or accept that the handle will look rough in a year.
I have opinions about kitchen gear that costs forty dollars and does one job. These are not that. These are the eight-dollar tool you keep in the drawer with the can opener and the microplane, and every few days you remember why you own them. Spatchcock a chicken, snip chives for a garnish, cut open a vacuum bag of short rib. Rinse them, dry them, drop them back in the drawer. Done.
If you’re stocking a drawer with reliable basics, check out our full cookware category for more kitchen essentials we’ve tested.
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