On the Knife's Edge

Knives are the signature tool of the cook.  One uses them to cleave the good from the bad, to sculpt the amorphous, to get to the heart of an ingredient.

In the world of professional cooks there are those who become knife-obsessed and carry around a twenty pound toolbox from station to station, choosing a new knife for each task.  Then there are those who have seemed to transcend this attachment, and these cooks work with rented knives that arrive sharp every week, are made of inferior metal and lose their edge no matter what you do.  These cooks nevertheless coax excellent work out of these hatchets, because they have a level of skill that surmounts the obstacle.

I work for a cook in the latter category, a thirty-year veteran who was mentored by Hubert Keller and worked in various amazing kitchens with some brilliant and edgy characters.  So I have struggled along with his preferred rented hatchets for years, keeping two knives of my own in reserve for special projects and emergencies.  And then, after working alongside one of the toolbox-toting nuts for awhile, I began to bring out my own knives more often.

(For those who are curious,  my two knives are Wusthof-made, which means German steel from the city of Solingen, where knives have been forged for centuries and the craft is quite elevated.  One is a 10 inch extra-wide chef's knife I bought reconditioned years ago, and the other is an 8 inch filet knife I received as a gift from my wife.)

Here's the hatchet and my Wusthof side by side:

Here's what I've been noticing.  Hatchets have a LOT of drag, which means they are impeded from cutting smoothly by the coarse texture of the steel and the wide angle of their edge.  They are also thick-bladed all the way to the where the edge is ground, to ensure they will have plenty of metal on them after a hundred confrontations with the water-cooled high speed grinding wheel that our knife company uses to sharpen them.  (A very cool device that will put a new edge on a knife after one pass in and out of the slot - i.e. two seconds.)  By contrast, my chef's knife is tapered as it approaches the edge, so the knife is wedge-shaped and much thinner overall. And the Wusthof steel has a visible grain which runs the width of the blade, and for this reason glides through a potato or beef filet with less drag.  That's my theory anyway.

Compare the edges - see where the hatchet has literally "been through the mill."

But the real value in using my own knife is that I have to confront its condition everyday.  If you pick up one of the four hatchets we have at work, and the edge has been blunted because of hard use (i.e. can opening) you throw it down and pick another one.  If my knife is dullish, I have to steel it, and keep steeling it, or grind a new edge using the medieval technology of the whetstone.  The stone takes skill and practice, so it's frustrating the first few times you use it because your technique is lousy and so is the resulting edge.  But about six weeks ago I got an edge on with a great "bite"- the kind that will cut ripe tomatoes cleanly, and I'd been keeping it up well, slicing chicken breasts into seven even layers night after night.

Then the lobsters arrived.

Removing the meat from a poached lobster involves a lot of blade abuse.   We cut into the claw shell (one of the thickest and hardest parts) with the edge of the knife to create a fracture one can exploit to shatter the rest of the claw and get at that wonderful lobe of muscle inside.  We also cut through the tail lengthwise and the knife has to cleave both parts of the shell and be sharp enough to divide the meat inside without tearing it.  I almost chickened out and took a hatchet for the project, but then decided to just commit to some quality time with the stone after I got finished with the lobsters.

Eight lobsters - eight tails, sixteen claws, and sixteen sets of knuckles (the upper "arm") which sometimes can't be cut apart with scissors and need to be chopped through.  Sure enough, our good set of scissors was AWOL.

Suffice to say the knife did the job with relative grace - the density of that thin blade is handy when chopping down into the claw - you can really feel the momentum build as you swing your wrist.  After the cutting board was littered with shell shards and misc goop (albumen) from the project, I had a neat pile of clean lobster meat ready to enjoy, and after cleaning up I put my knife to the steel to see if I could coax it back into form.

Amazingly, it seemed unharmed.  I was chopping chives with it a few minutes later and doing a very clean job.

A hatchet would never have done that.

So here's to German steel, which is damn hard stuff.

And I'm starting to see that one arrives at the point of no-attachment to the tool being used after mastering the tool and its care.  After building the confidence to handle the consequences, your skills replace the tool, become the tool.

One of the things my boss can do is make a wonderful rolled omelet.  One of his long-time customers saw him filling in at a poolside kitchen station at a country club where he was the Executive Chef.  They asked if he could make them an omelet and he tried to dissuade them saying "I don't have a burner to use at this station, or of course I would make you one."  The customer said: "I know you.  You can make an omelet with a cigarette lighter and a pie tin" or something to that effect.

You get the idea.


P.S. I thought sharp was sharp until my wife brought home a Japanese knife that's ground only on one side - so the edge is half as broad as a western knife.  People swear these knives greatly improve the cut one can make on delicate things like raw tuna.  I've always been skeptical.  This summer, I cut up a few dozen peaches with this thing, and it does actually cut more cleanly and straight than I thought possible.

Always learning something. . .

What's your favorite knife?