“In each kitchen he met chefs who knew almost nothing about knives. “These are our main tools,” he recalls thinking. “Why don’t we know how to take care of them?”
Julia Child one said she had enough knives to outfit a pirate ship. “But she mostly depended on just 3 of them.” Anthony Bourdain recommends needing only a 7 or 8 inch chef’s knive for any implementation whatsoever. I can’t imagine using a chef’s knife for every task I complete in the kitchen. There are, in so many words, major advantages in using a knife for its intended purpose, whether it’s slicing tomatoes or chopping chives or butchering a fish.
“Never buy a set” recommends Corby Kummer in an April 2007 edition of Atlantic Monthly. “Few people use more than three knives, and its practically inconceivable that one manufacturer will make the three likeliest to please you.” Kummer’s advice was interesting to me. Here is what my search turned up:
Class Camp knife (burgessforge.com)
African Blackwood Santoku — Behnke Forge
W2 boning knife – LeBlancKnives
CUSTOM CUTLERY (faithandfireforge.com)
These fantastic manufacturers and smiths certainly give a good name to the handmade knife industry in the states. For most of the past century, European knife makers (primarily Wusthof and Henckles) have dominated the market for mass produced cutlery. However, since popularizations on TV shows (e.g. “Forged in Fire”) among actual associations and organizations, such as the American Bladesmith Society, which emerged in the 1970s, the knife manufacturing industry has evolved, adopted rules and policies, standards of quality and developed a wide berth of media surrounding knife forging culture.
The American Bladesmith Society is divided into journeyman and master bladesmith categories. To join the ranks of either group, you must prove your ability not only to create a knife, but for it to pass certain benchmark tests.
“Any decent knife can be made sharp at its cutting edge; what matters is the shape of the steel behind it — what cutlery experts call “edge geometry.” a blade that is ground, for instance, with wide heavily angled geometry, won’t move through fish or a tomato as smoothly as a thin, tapered edge can, but it will murder chicken bones,” Todd Oppenheimer explains in a November 2008 New Yorker magazine article.
It may surprise you to discover that many bladesmiths don’t have culinary equipment as a part of their repertoire — they choose to focus on hunting, bowie, camping or other styles of knife, avoiding kitchen favorites like serrated, paring and filleting knives. Oppenheimer mentions in his article that “while this is the world’s largest blade show, only a handful of makers there produce kitchen knives.”
Evidently, in that handful are some crafty artisans. Consider Krammer, one of those few. In his New Yorker article about Krammer, Oppenheimer relates, “But cooks who have used a broad range of cutlery told me that Kramer’s knives have a balance, a physical comfort, a lightness and ease on the cutting board that their competitors lack.” He goes on to comment “Kramer’s role that this year’s show was to serve as a human display item at the booth for the U.S. division of Kai, the Japanese houseware and cutlery corporation that is manufacturing Kramers’s Sur la Table line, under its explosively successful brand, Shun.”
Kramer was a high profile person in the knife community and gained a lot of respect in his career, but he is not the only one. These forces together moved the quality and the style of knives on the market available at all, and, more specifically, geared towards kitchen professionals, to the level we see them at today. It’s likely to expect future generations of smithers to make knives for the people of their time. Several human species were alive until 10,000 years ago and cooking began on a daily basis 300,000 years ago. Do the math — prehistorically there were other species of humans that were using knives for very similar tasks we use them for today.