Hello world so I bought some hand-crafted traditionally made Japanese Knives
and I kind of messed a couple of them so I want to tell you about that story and umm
I wanted to tell you because I think the world of knives is a bit intimidating
and there's a lot to learn and I'm a total newbie to all of this
So I thought bringing you along that journey of learning that I've had
might help someone else who's new to knives and especially Japanese Knives I think
I will make mistakes so I apologize for them I try to learn as much as possible
so if I make mistakes I'm very sorry about that
and this will be kind of a more of a raw unedited video or less edited video so
this is the condition of the knife literally two weeks after I gave it to my sister-in-law
How did it get to that point so quickly?
to get to that I going to have to rewind a bit my wife and I were set to go to Echizen
where among a few traditional crafts they do they hand-craft knives
as my sister-in-law was going to watch our kids while we were away we thought
"one of those knives will be a great gift" especially since she cooks a lot
she was in fact very nervous about owning an expensive knife and told us not to buy her one
umm but when we went to the knife factory
Ryusen Hamono and met with the CEO the knife master we asked him the question of
Can an everyday cook buy and use one of these things? and this is what he had to say
I understand that customers are nervous to use these thin, beautiful knives.
But we make tools to cut food so that you can eat and live,
So please feel free and don't be scared of using one.
We have our clients who have been using our knives for 20 to 30 years.
Some mothers even pass their knives on to their daughters
So with all that in mind my wife and I excitedly spend a couple hours
testing out all these knives you see on this cutting board and ended up
picking a sentoku knife that we felt was best for our needs.
Now I don't know enough about knives to know if this is a laser or not
but what I do know is when you have it and you go to slice it's umm it's really cuts nicely so
Here we go
It's also very lightweight so we liked it sharp, lightweight, What's not to like?
and it was actually the cheapest out of all the knives
the cheapest being about 150USD so we decided to buy one not only for us but for my sister-in-law
and only a week later we both had issues the knives were rusting
ah for my case it was my daughter she was you know cutting up something at night
she left it in a pool of water the next day "oh my goodness it's rusting"
but I looked online and I remembered a video that Jun had about
the rusty knife and fixing it so I looked at that and there was I reddit post attached to it
where somebody told about all the equipment they bought so I got rust erasers and
I got stropping stuff and we got some cream and I was able to
kind of get all the rust out there's a few little kind of like parkmarks left but I think it's
almost almost like new but yeah I did mess it up and recover it but
it was my sister-in-laws knife that was in a lot worse of a coniditon and I'll let her explain
As I always use a stainless knife,
after washing it, I put it in the dish rack.
So I did the same thing with this,
and then I found it rusty,
then we decided to sharpen it,
using an easy one.
My husband used this to sharpen it.
And then it chipped.
So we had a fight...
We thought what should we do, and then came to Greg.
Because what we didn't know and it's a learning curve is that
you know such a hard delicate blade umm you can't sharpen with one of these things or with a
honing steel you need to use wet stones which I now have
but the problem was that he chipped the knife as well as rusted it so it was way beyond my
pay grade to even try to fix
but the words of the CEO of Ryusen Hamono kind of sprang into my mind
If something happens to your knife,
we are here to fix it for you, as our products need to maintain its quality
About the maintenance, you don't always need to send it to us.
We teach you tips so that you can do it by yourself
We are happy to give you advice so it's not difficult at all.
So I shipped it to Ryusen Hamono and not one week later it came back
The fixed knife!
and so we got it back right here so this is the fixed knife now so this is her first time seeing it
so let her open it up and see
Can I say one more thing, sorry.
Because the blade is really thin,
I thought using this would break it,
so I said don't use it, but
my husband said it's OK.
Apparently after one pass through it chipped.
On top of that he didn't even tell me, so it made me mad.
It got all jagged just after it was gifted to us.
Because it got jagged, I was fuming.
OK, I'm done.
- OK, so it's fixed. -Alright.
- Open it please. - Thank you.
Three
Two
One
Open!
Wah! Amazing!
Wow, it's real.
It's like brand new!
- [Mother in background] Did they fix it for you? - [Daughter] Yeah, fantastic.
The chip was here, but it's all fixed!
Yeah, now I feel a different pressure.
I really have to take care of it.
I will treasure it.
Ah, amazing!
This, this.
Supre excellent sharpness!
Stress... it's stress free.
Sugoi!
It's like cutting with a slicer, wow!
Look!
No stress.
It's light as well.
So how do you take care of it now?
- I'll teach you know. - Hai!
- It's easy, it's easy, look. - Yes
- Like this - Yes.
It's OK now.
- Right? - Yeah.
This was the important step to to prevent rusting.
I now understand, thank you so much.
- OK. - I won't let my husband touch this.
- Alright. - I'm done!
Yes, all done!
The Steel
So why did a moderately expensive knife like this rust? Well it's the steel so
on the end of the spectrum you have carbon which can get really sharp and hard but can rust easily
and then on the other hand you have something like this which is considered a stainless steel where
they have a low amount of carbon but a high amount of chromium which makes it stainless
and so this knife is called a umm the metals called HAP-40
and it's kind of like a semi stainless and between so you
can leave it in water for probably an hour and you'll be fine
but if you leave it for a few hours yeah it's going to rust
probably the biggest difference between Japanese knives and western knives is the steel
and the hardness so they're harder then western knives this is a Japanese knife this is a western knife
and umm they're more brittle but like how can you be hard yet more brittle?
like I kind of couldn't wrap my head around it but then I thought about this so
this is a cheap cheap ladle and I'm just going to bang it like this
Right so you can just bend it back right so this is a tough
piece of metal because you can stress it a lot and it won't break but it will bend
right whereas if I take this knife no I'm not going to even try that
this I mean if you did that I think it will break eventually or at least chip
pieces of so it's hard but it's not tough right you can if you stress it enough it will break
and so that's the difference so this type of knife I can abuse it a lot more because it's a softer
steel and it won't break yeah
I hope you can read that
So this is a 180mm cenelli knife it's made in Italy but it's called a Japanese Knife
I guess it's Japanese style and the makeup of the steel is X50 CR MO 14
kind of sounds cryptic but the X50 its stands for X stands for carbon in this case
and it's 0.5% carbon whereas the CR stands for chromium and it's 14% chromium
So carbon makes something hard chromium makes something soft
but the reason you have so much chromium in there is because you want the stainless capabilities
so yeah I could leave this in water overnight and just throw it into the dish pit here
and it will be fine so it can take a lot of abuse
but the hardness takes a hit so on the Rockwell hardness scale it's a 54 to 56
now there's actually a lot elements you can add a knife besides chromium and carbon to make it
do different things so vanadium is one of them so with a wusthof knife what is it it's a X50 Cr MoV 15
is what you'll see written on a wusthof knife I'm probably mispronouncing that sorry Germans umm
but it will get it harder so it's a 58 on the rockwell hardness scale
that's cool and this is a HAP-40 knife and it has a lot more of those hard components in it
umm so carbon is at like 1.3% or 1.4% something around that
it's not that much more but it makes a difference it's also a powdered steel it's like a high speed stool
stool, high speed tool steel
and umm you can get it way harder it's like a 64 to 66 according to the manufacturer
but depending on how you treat it, it can get even harder then that
so the point of a powdered high speed tool steel I believe I'm saying it right
is that umm you can get it harder yet retain some of the toughness but still
even as you know tough as that steel is it's not going to be as tough as this
There are so many different steels I could talk about but the last one I will is this Japanese steel
which is called VG10 and it's supposed to be hard as well as stainless
and umm so it's very popular with Japanese people and it is a 60
on the Rockwell hardness scale
now another thing about this knife is that it has what called damascus
cladding it's not like a damascus knife
all the way through or something like that I believe that technology has been lost to the ages
but damascus cladding you can see this pattern here it means you have soft and hard stainless steel
that are like so many layers I believe this ones 33 layers if I'm correct and
that makes that pattern when you make the knife so it's kind of cool looking
as far as I can tell western knives are lot more standardized and mass produced
now it could just be that I don't know much about knives but Japanese knives seem to have a lot more variety to them
the types of steels that are used and the different types of knives so this is called a
sentoku this is called a nagiri
and there's gyuto and there's just a ton of different styles of Japanese knives
as well as handles you can see this ones octaga~ octagonal
I'll try that again this one is octagonal and this ones kind of octagonal but not quite
it's a really nice handle though beautiful
and as I said before the thing about Japanese knives is because they're harder
they can require different sharpening techniques
and one of the most recommended ones is wet stones
Cutting boards
Now because I got hard Japanese knives this meant that I had to look into cutting boards
because while people want their knives hard
umm you actually want the opposite with your cutting board
you don't want a hard cutting board otherwise it'll dull
your hard knife so plastic cutting boards like
all these ones that I had were not great
umm or I mean you can use them of course but they will dull your knife faster
I should mention though that there are soft plastic and there are hybrids that you can get but
I'm going to just talk about wood and so this is a wood I got from Kochi
and it is a hinoki or cypress and so there are so many different types of woods there's
Maple there's teek there is cypress hinoki and this is called Kiri yeah
and so yeah this cutting board is from Kochi which I actually visited last year
and it's made from a single piece of wood so I believe it'll be less hard to break
then a lamented engrain or edge grain board
although this is a soft wood so it might not last as long for other reasons umm
but so the thing about hinoki which is cypress is that it's a
aromatic wood so in Japanese saunas you'll have this and it's a nice smelling wood oh
there's my cats being fed and versus a hard wood like maple this board is actually quite light
but even lighter is this wood it's a hinoki
and it's not hinoki sorry it's kiri and this wood over here it is super light
umm and I think it has bigger pores so I don't believe it'll last as long
but it was quite popular in the stores when I went around the knife shops in Kappabashi
a famous area for buying kitchen equipment in Tokyo it was really cheap too relatively
so it was about 15USD
So the thing I learned about wood cutting boards is that they can be more sanitary
then plastic cutting boards
And umm for example with maple the grains there are really fine in hard wood
and so what it will do it will kind of like suck down the bacteria and trap it in there
and kill it now with this type of wood it is
a soft wood and so the grains are bigger and so it's kind of like a different action that happens
so when I did the research about this one it's kind of a special type of cypress
I think this stuff grown in Aomori and apparently this one in Kochi as well
they have anti-bacterial properties
so they're supposed to be good as well umm now the thing with
plastic cutting boards is initially their really easy to sanitize
and so people think ok that's really good but then
if you look at this board I've had it for a while and it's ok I'm going to bring closer because it's super shiny
so yeah look at that I don't think that's sanitary anymore
and the thing is because you get these deep grooves and the stuff just gets stuck in there
and doesn't come out so it's a bit different then a wood cutting board so I should just really throw this away
and this cutting board is very hard so I don't think it's really great for your knives
since 90% of what we'll cut is going to be fruits and vegetables
we're going to mainly use our wood cutting boards and for the meats and fish
just because my wife likes to be really really heavy on the bleach
we're going to use the plastic cutting boards for that, that's like 10% of the time
and the thing is you can't use bleach on wood
it will break down the wood and destroy it and it's not good so
just another tip for you don't use bleach on your wood
and wash them off and dry them right after using
Sharpening
So once I had the cutting board thing solved
the other worry I had was getting and keeping the knives sharp
and so what actually happened is a long journey
of sharpening and this started over a year ago
and the first stone I got was this one I think it's a king I think it's a 1000 or 6000 grit
so 1000 is the rougher harder side and 6000 is the smoother side
and so what everybody recommended was to get a cheaper stone
and to practice with cheaper knives so this knife is from IKEA it's a 10 dollar knife
this knife is umm actually from a chef kitchen store but it's like a 40 dollar knife
so good knives to practice on and so when I was sharpening I was doing them
you know manually I was looking at like hours and hours of videos about sharpening
and the key about sharpening is that you want to have a consistent angle
and a lot of knives nowadays have a 15 degree angle
but whether you put it like 20 or 10 or 15 or 17 or 16 I think most people say
umm from what I read is that it's most important to get it at a consistent angle so you have to like
keep it at whatever angle you choose umm so I got this and for a year I practiced and
I got the knives sharp but I didn't think they were
that I didn't know that I wasn't doing that great of a job
umm because after I got this thing this is like a angle guide that you clip on to your knife
and so what this helps you do is keep it at a consistent angle the whole way through
right it's a really this is like 6 dollars this thing and umm
the thing about this it changed the game completely once I used this
I was like ohh wow this is how sharp I can get knives if I have a consistent angle
so this really helped me although some people think it's kind of like a crutch like training wheels and so
your never going to learn how to do it properly but honestly it's helped me so much
if you have like trouble doing it
on your own or finding out the right angle and I tried different tricks like putting pennies under
or something like this height and I just couldn't do it right
umm this thing can really help when your learning
and because I got better knives I decided to invest in better stones so I have 3 shopton
ceramic wet stones so this ones like a 320 grit like this
and then this ones 1500 so medium and this one is 5000
and I really like the feel of these stones a lot better
but once you add up the price of these stones and then
this to hold the stones which is really helpful because I found
this thing kept on moving around so this one keeps it really steady
and then I have a leather stropping block with the compound
umm and I think I kind of not doing a good job with this stropping block either
anyways that's all like 175USD
umm so it's more expensive then my new favorite knife
umm but I think these are something like especially since I don't use them often
that you can keep for decades and keep
whether it's your cheap knives or your more expensive knives sharp so I think it's definitely worth investment
I've actually found myself enjoying sharpening knives
and so I'm actually trying to sharpen the knives of friends
not their good knives but just their cheaper ones
I'm not comfortable trying to practice on people's nice knives yet
Let's cut stuff!
So you might of heard that a bad sharp knife is better then a good dull knife
and I'd agree but what even better is a good sharp knife so umm
what you do is you can take paper like this, this is kind of like thin magazine paper and
I've sharpened all these knives good enough that they can cut the paper
Yay everyone likes this at least in videos they're always cutting paper
and ahh I hope I don't embarrass myself ah and doesn't cut but yep
that cuts well ok
see told you I was going to embarrass myself a few
don't hit the right angle or something sometimes it's looks like the knives not sharp but
yeah it's sharp and then lastly this knife here
right they can all cut paper they're all sharp in that way
but I found the real differences when you start cutting things and this is what I've wanted to do
ever since I had started filming ok so first of all I'm to start off with
a tomato that's a favorite thing to cut
I haven't practiced this before so I don't know how well these will cut this tomato
but let's try and see so that's actually really good
It was super smooth to cut with this knife this is 10 dollar IKEA knife
ok 40 dollar knife
Hmm
Yep also really good I think it got caught on the bottom a little bit I didn't press down hard enough
Ok and then is the kind of laser knife and yep
really easy
and then this is actually a 300 dollar knife but we got it on discount because
it has these scratches right here and you probably can't even tell
umm we got it for like half price because of that so that was cool
Yep
cuts nice as well so everything cuts tomatoes good so honestly if I was just cutting a tomato
I'd say wow these are all pretty good knives ok so now I magically have an apple and
Ok that's.....
I have to put more pressure down on the apple which is not a big deal but the you know the cuts are ok
Now if I take the laser knife
It's just so smooth I don't know oh wait the apple got in my way
It's just so smooth let's try this knife out here
This is easier then the IKEA knife
Yep
that's nice so one of the vegetables where I noticed the biggest difference was the carrot
and so when I cut with this knife
I feel like once you get to the middle
it's like just not
I don't know as smooth it's not bad but
like when I look at it I can just see kind of a rough texture now with this knife
it's glides through so smoothly I don't have to put much pressure on it
and then it's just so smooth
so the last thing I'll show is a cucumber
if I'm not putting much pressure it's not cutting
which I mean I can just put pressure on and cut it and I can do the
it will cut fine so there's not a big deal but it's just such a difference because
when I take a knife like this now and I just like I'm
I'm not putting pressure on it and it's just cutting right through it's incredible
and that kind of brings the fun into
cutting stuff like I really enjoy cutting things now because it's just so easy and smooth
and so if I only did the test with the tomato
I wouldn't have known the difference but once you start a variety of things your like ok wow
there is a big difference between the knives
one thing I never had anybody tell me is like how do you avoid these things from rolling off everywhere
I've never figured that out see there you go
Final thoughts and tests
ok from everything I've learned so far I think these are the two things I can say about Japanese knives
versus western knives so with the Japanese knives they are harder
and so they can retain their edge longer and they can be sharper for longer
nice sharp knives ok the second thing is that they are
thinner so the grind or the geometry it's a lot more thinner of a knife
in comparison to a western knife on average so you can also cut easier
through things so I think that's the experience I had with different vegetables I was cutting
was that the thinness really helped it cut through
and that's why I think even though this was sharp enough to cut paper
and cut tomatoes it kind of struggled with things like carrots and with the apples
um this just the geometry of this is so much thinner and it performed better and it' hard as well
so something that seemed a little bit crazy to me was that I could actually taste the sharpness ok so
I have all these slices and let me just show you
So I can taste the sharpness
I don't know what me eating it actually shows you but it's like slippery and it's umm
I don't know it just feels good to eat and apparently because you have such a sharp cut
that it'll break a lot less of the cells in something like a carrot or an onion
and so it will retain the moisture a lot better so apparently if you cut an onion with a sharp knife
it's not going to make you cry so I wanted to test this I've never tried this before let me try
So far I'm so good so that's one batch of onions
Ahh that's what I should of done flipped it
Ok so you know what I can feel the onions in my eyes and umm I don't know about that
maybe because I chopped so much of it that it's I can feel it so
I don't know about that, that's what I've learned
but maybe it's not as severe as if I had a duller knife cutting it I don't know
so here's my final thing about knives
I love this HAP-40 knife it's super thin kind of like a laser and it's just so fun to cut with
umm this V610 this nagiri knife
I really like it as well such a beautiful knife and I hope to get a lot of long years out of it
just not as fun as this one
and I'm still keeping these knives and so these two over here
but like for this one if I'm going to cut bones or cut like really hard things like squash
umm I don't want to risk these knives
so I can just use one of these knives and be safe and then I have my stones where I can
fix it if anything goes wrong but they are tougher knives so they can take a lot more abuse
Thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring this video right now
this is my current skill level \ of drawing this is my cat
since kindergarten I've never gotten better and I think this is an insulting to
kindergartners because I know they can draw better then this so when I saw a class
that said I could learn how to draw better I thought "hey I'm down for that"
so Skillshare it's a online learning community
with thousands of classes and they cover all sorts of creative and entrepreneurial skills
premium membership will give you unlimited access to all those classes
so you can take whatever fancies your interest you can do it to fuel your curiosity
to be creative or to thrive in your career
it's really whatever you want because Skillshare is a place that helps you learn and grow
and in comparison to in person classes it's very affordable
so an annual subscription will cost you less then 10 dollars a month so what's hard to go wrong
especially since with the link in the description you can get 2 months
free trial so what is there to lose
at least I'm a better photographer then I am a drawer but stay tuned for next month when I reveal
what my new drawing skills look like
So I really do hope learned just a little bit from this video
again I'm a total noob so don't ask me questions umm but yeah
Thanks for watching! See you next time, bye! What's your favorite knife?