What’s in a kitchen knife?
When you enjoy cooking
then it’s nice to have decent tools, a good cooker, quality pans, good
ingredients and as all keen cooks know, a good sharp knife.
I’ve had some decent
knives over the years and some time ago I invested in a couple of Global knives. These have proved extremely good but after almost 15 years they need
some professional sharpening attention. I also have a set of Midori knives.
These were a gift about 9 years ago and are made from Damascus steel by
Richardson Sheffield and besides being beautiful they have performed excellently
over the years, once again professional sharpening was needed.
I finally found a
company called Blade & Butler who offer a mail order service and so off
went all three of the bigger knives. It took a couple of weeks but the knives
came back nice and sharp.
In the meanwhile I started thinking about spoiling myself with something new and finally settled on a product from Blenheim Forge in Peckham (of all places).
These knives are
forged by hand by a tiny team using extraordinary materials, to me they are a
thing of absolute beauty, like a work of art but which you can use every day.
They will make you a completely custom knife but I chose a Nakiri, a Japanese
design ideal for vegetable chopping. According to the Blenheim team, the knife
is made from 3 layers of steel. The inner layer is a super hard Japanese steel
with the outer protective layers being a softer steel. When the knife is
finished, the layers are exposed with the hard centre exposed as a very thin
blade. The outer layers near the top of the blade retain some of the rough
finish straight from the forge!
Being made from carbon
steel, the knife must be looked after or it will rust. In addition over time it
will stain but this is the same for all carbon steel knives and is something I’ve
been used to in the past. The plus side is that the knife will hold it’s edge
for much longer since the steel is harder.
I’ve had the knife for a couple of weeks now and I am absolutely delighted with it. It has a comforting weight to it which feels solid, because the blade is so thin it works really well with even the smallest of things. The shape of the blade is new to me and I’m still getting used to it but every time I use it I’m sure I spend too much time admiring it!