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- There's just sort of a ritual aspect to knives and cooks
that I think is powerful.
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The emotional connection that you have to something
that you use everyday, that you take care of.
It needs to work well and do all of those things,
but it's also a lot more than that.
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(knife blade scraping on steel)
After cooking for about eight or nine years professionally,
I had collected a bunch of knives,
gotten really interested in them, how they're made.
It's so important for me to have had that experience
of using knives in the professional kitchen.
Working in restaurants and all that has
just allowed me to appreciate all the details
of a kitchen knife in a way that would be hard to do
if you didn't have that experience,
so I think that informs what I do as a knife maker.
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Doing things by hand is just the more
enjoyable way to do it for me.
(hammer clanking on metal)
The way I make knives is by hand-forging,
so hammer and anvil.
There's sort of a broad distinction in kitchen knives
between Japanese-style knives
and European, traditionally French and German.
The European knives tend to be made
a little bit softer, resistant to chipping,
but won't hold an edge quite as long.
The Japanese knives tend to be at a higher hardness,
ground very, very thin at the very edge,
which means they will hold an edge longer
but will be more prone to chipping at the edge,
so it needs to be used by somebody
who's aware of what they're using and can take care of it.
But then there's also major stylistic differences.
Typically the European-style chef knives
have a blade that sweeps up.
Western cooks are taught to cut by rolling the blade,
whereas the Japanese knives tend to have a flatter edge.
You lift the knife up and bring it down.
There's not one style of knife skills.
Everybody kinda does their own thing.
Can you do it quickly and accurately?
That's all that matters.
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So this is sort of the raw material that I use.
A 52100 steel.
This is 1095 in a square bar.
I learn a lot about what I need to do to the material
by touching it, feeling it.
Traditionally knives are made through forging steel
and not cast.
(hammer clanking on steel) I think it has to do with
the grain size of the steel
because large grains create sort of a brittle material.
Casting metal is heating this metal up to the melting point
and then pouring it into a mold.
When you heat steel up,
the hotter you get it, the larger the grains grow.
You want the grain structure
to be as fine as possible in a knife.
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Forging steel is the process of heating the steel up
and hammering it into shape.
When the steel gets to a certain temperature,
it becomes malleable and soft,
so it allows me to distribute the metal where I want it.
We're nice and thick here,
and then we get very, very thin out here.
You can only really get that with a forged knife
'cause it allows you to move the material
out where you want it.
So once we heat treat it,
then it's gonna become hard enough
to hold a cutting edge and be a knife.
The process of heat treatment
is one of the most important things.
Any sort of process of heating and cooling the steel
to achieve a desired result.
You can control a lot of the properties of the steel
based on how you heat treat the material.
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So every steel has its own recipe.
My heat treatment is a two-step process.
It involves a quench and a tempering.
For the quench that I do,
I heat the steel up, and then I cool it rapidly
in an industrial quench oil.
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When the steel has been quenched,
it's in a very hard state,
but that also means that it can be brittle.
So that's where the second part of heat treating comes in,
which is the temper stage.
Heating the steel to a lower temperature
in order to reduce the hardness of the steel.
Grinding the blade and the overall just geometry
of the knife really determines what it's good at doing
and what it's not as good at doing.
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It's made in a very organic way.
I want that to bear the marks of the maker.
It's difficult for a knife to do everything well.
Every knife that I make has an individuality to it.
This is a butcher's knife.
This knife is specifically designed
to butcher meat and fish.
Very thick at the spine, so they're quite heavy,
but then they get very thin at the edge
so they cut really well.
This is a medium-sized chef knife.
They could be used for pretty much everything,
from butchering meat and fish to cutting vegetables
on the cutting board.
Here's a pairing knife that I make.
Paring knives can be used for peeling vegetables,
trimming of meat and fish,
garlic, shallots, anything that's kinda small and thin.
I don't work from patterns or specific templates ever.
That's why it's so much more enjoyable
for me to work that way than to
get knives cut out by a machine.
I find that that limits the expression
that I'm able to put into each knife.
(tool scraping on wood)
The main next thing I do after grinding
is making a handle.
I'll usually saw down a block of wood.
It's very important how a knife feels in your hand,
and it's not a one size fits all type of deal.
You have to find something
that fits your hand well.
And then the weight and the balance of the knife
is probably the most important part of the ergonomics of it.
Cooks are very protective of their knives, oftentimes.
There's a certain ritual in the kitchen
of cleaning your knives at the end of the day
and then sharpening them,
so all those things help to build
a kind of emotional connection with those tools.
It just becomes an extension of your body.
It's very satisfying to be part of
a tradition of blacksmithing and forging
that goes back centuries, millennia.
Learning techniques that people have been using
for hundreds of years to be one of not that many people
in today's world doing it,
to sort of carry on the tradition
or keep it alive in some ways.
So when I finish a knife, I sharpen it by hand
on the whetstones.
It's just that final way of putting some hand work
into the knife and really making it special.
Coming from working in kitchens
and now making knives that promotes the expression
and the creativity of the person who's using it.
That's the thing that keeps me so motivated
to keep making more knives
is seeing a knife that has imperfections that represent
the fact that it was handmade.
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I try to do my best to make something
that lives up to the standard of what people want,
something that has my spirit put into it,
has a story behind it,
that then goes into somebody's knife kit
and helps them express themselves
through the food they make.
They all reflect a certain part of me
in how they were made.
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