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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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