A bench knife, also known as a pastry scraper, is a straight-edged metal rectangle with a handle along one side. Its primary use is to scrape unrolled dough from a work surface and cut dough into smaller pieces, but it comes in handy for other tasks, too. It’s great for cutting bar cookies in the pan, loosening rolled-out dough from the counter, and transferring chopped ingredients from cutting board to skillet (slide them onto a side). And once the baking is done, we find it indispensable for scraping the work surface clean.