(upbeat music)
(elevator music)
- Hello!
Welcome to a very special episode of Worth It One Stop.
We got the Worth It crew in the car here.
You can put our names above our heads.
- We are revisiting a place that we've been to before.
It's called the APL in Hollywood.
- [Steven] It it was family-style meat.
- And one of the signature features of this restaurant
was a special knife that Adam Perry Lang,
the chef, made himself.
And because we ate a very tender meat last time,
we're going to be going back to eat a proper steak
and see him make this knife
which has the very impressive price of $951.
(Steven exhales deeply)
But it's for a good reason. - No, no, no, no.
$950 and one cent.
- $950 and one cent.
(Steven exhales deeply)
- So we're gonna a knife get made,
and we're eat a steak, sounds like a great day to me.
Also, Annie came the most prepared for this shoot.
As you can see
from her earrings. - Yeah.
(smooth music)
- Hi, I'm KC Lund, I'm a blade smith,
specializing in swords and chef knives.
- I'm Adam Perry Lang, APL Restaurant,
I'm a chef and blade smith.
And I'll say it, master swordsmith and blade smith.
He won't say it but he is the man.
- Swords and chef knives.
- Yeah.
- Those two don't seem to be the closest
in the family together but I guess they are.
- Sure they are!
They cut things.
- [Steven] Yeah.
- Swords are for bigger things.
(both laughs)
- Your fascination for blades, where did that come from?
- Probably 80s B movies.
- [Steven] Really?
- Always wanted a sword.
Typical boy, I guess, as a teenager,
and that's when I started.
- And today we're gonna be making the felony steak knife.
- Why is it called the felony knife?
- They made a felony in California,
it has to be an amount above 950.
It's priced to be a deterrent, it's not priced to sell.
I'm just looking to hold on to my stuff.
I invest so much time in the entire customer experience
that for me it was a logical last piece of the puzzle.
I could procure the beef, age it, cook it,
gets put out to the customer,
I didn't wanna give them a crappy blade,
I wanted to give something that was truly meaningful.
So for me it was really a statement.
- We've heard chefs describe the making of food hundreds
of times but never of a knife.
So if we could go into now the step by step process
of making this knife.
- We'll take a round bar of steel,
break that down into bar stock under the big forging hammer.
The ABL steel that we use was developed in Sweden
and it was designed specifically to be used as razor blades.
Crush that down into a flat plate essentially.
Blades get cut from that bar.
- [Adam] The shape really came out
of the function of it,
how much of the blade you actually use
when you're cutting a steak is typically
like only the first third of the blade
so for me the actual design came
from what's called a drop point hunters
where the blade itself is shifted down.
On the most basic level it's just mouth feel,
cutting with something as opposed to tearing it up
and having this feathery, cottony piece of torn meat.
Cutting with a good blade is like,
it already starts off the whole moment right.
- Without the proper heat treat,
it doesn't matter what steel you used,
if you didn't heat treat it right, it's garbage.
That's where my specialty's been at for so many years,
developing these digitally controlled salt pods.
- That's actually how we met and when he started talking
about possibly blowing myself up I said,
you know I think I'm gonna have to become friends with him.
(laughing)
- What are the risks?
- The high temperature salt
is running 1600 degrees fahrenheit
If you had a little bit of moisture, one drop of water,
it'll blow like a shotgun out the tube.
So you'll blow 1500 degree molten salt out.
So by heating up the blade
and if you cool it quickly enough,
you'll form a microstructure called martensite.
It looks like a bunch of needles all stacked together.
For this particular steel, then after that,
once you can touch it with your hands,
it has to go into liquid nitrogen.
And that brings it down to negative 320 degrees fahrenheit.
And that will actually complete the hardening process.
When you sharpen the edge and you look at it
under an electron microscope,
you can actually see the carbides,
they look like little saw teeth.
The smaller those are,
the better a slicer the blade's gonna be.
- You can really cut a steak with a store bought knife,
there's no question about it.
But the question is, the intention behind the blade.
It's like a transfer of energy of just like,
hey, we did the best that we could
in this whole entire process
and it's interesting to know the story behind rather
than just kind of creating these meaningless objects
that just are there for us just to use cause,
at the end of the day, what's the point?
- That's good.
- I must ask, we're gonna eat a steak tomorrow.
What steak would you recommend that we ate
and actually pair this knife with.
- I'm just such a huge fan of the tomahawk
because you get all these different textures
and muscles that you would get.
Here you have like four different ones,
you have have the meat along the bone,
you have the deckle outside, you have the eye meat,
you have all the things between.
So I'm gonna say the tomahawk steak, which is a rib eye.
I'm getting hungry already. (laughing)
- I'll second that one.
- [Steven] Sounds great.
(dinging)
So here, we have the APL $950 and one cent felony knife.
- At the forge we saw the high polish finish
and this is the tumbled finish as it is at the restaurant.
Which I really love.
- How is the hand feel?
- Feels good. (Steven laughing)
Hope I don't look menacing just getting
so much pleasure from holding a knife.
- Okay, alright.
- So the knife is not the only weapon at the table.
We also have the tomahawk.
- I though you were gonna be like, these guns.
- (laughs) No, although, also yeah.
- Cheers.
- Mmm, the only thing left to decide
is who gets to go first.
Who gets the first stab. - Ummm.
- [Both] Rock, paper, scissors, shoot.
- Damn it.
- Oh, oh my goodness, wow, okay so this is my cut.
- [Steven] Nice one.
- Not that I wanna hand a really dangerous knife to a baby,
the strength of a baby could have cut through that.
But don't give knives to babies.
- Oh. - How do you feel?
- I keep looking at the knife, it's weird.
I like, just picked up this beautiful piece of steak
but my eyes stayed right here.
(laughing)
- When I cut into it, it felt like I was putting
on a glove that fit perfectly.
- [Both] Mmmmh.
- That was so good.
Usually I morn finishing taking a bite
of something so delicious
but when I'm done - Ahhh.
- with my bite, - Yes.
- it's knife time.
(both laughing)
- [Steven] Go for it.
- [Both] Oooh.
- I would not be afraid to take the path less taken
with this knife.
Alright, I'm gonna cut the meat off the bone right here.
My favorite part of the meat.
- [Andrew] I'm super jealous that you get to do this.
- Clean off the bone.
- Up here, there's a different part of the meat.
The deckle.
Ooh. - Oh.
- That's just,
it's a different texture at the top of the tomahawk
so we got a slightly different knife experience.
- [Both] Mmmmh.
I think my teeth are jealous of this knife.
- The idea of the felony knife, it's fun, it's goofy,
what it really does is it allows us to appreciate the level
of detail that goes into this knife.
- You sit down and see this knife here
and you just think, oh this is gonna be good.
It's always
the little details. - Oooh.
- You're like, this is not just gonna be some old dinner.
- So like when you look at my fashion choices
and you're like, this is gonna be a good time.
- No, on one thinks that.
- Okay, fine, but they do when they look at Adam.
(jazzy music)