by Tim Hayward
It’s a strange revelation. Sure, machines are used to make your car engine or watch, but that happens in a controlled, distant way in a factory. Hand-forging a knife is a process just primitive enough to make the effort involved explicit, and in a strange way, it somehow manages to contain and store that.
A popular fashion among knife aficionados at the moment is Damascus steel, forged from blocks made up from many layers of metal to create a gorgeous, textured effect when polished and etched. I’m a rigorous advocate of form following function, so I used to wonder why we bother with Damascus finish on knife blades. Laminating had some purpose in swords – it was important that your blade was strong enough to strike another without shattering – but when your opponent is a tomato, Damascus is just an affectation. But now I see it differently. A Damascus blade shows the world what was done to it in its making. The effort that went into beating 65 pieces of steel together to make this blade is manifest – and the display is beautiful.
ON KNIFEMAKERS
JONATHAN WARSHAWSKY, James Ross-Harris and Richard Warner are, collectively, Blenheim Forge, among the very few British knifemakers who both specialise in culinary blades and forge their own metal.* There is something, perhaps, in spending long days, repeatedly beating the hell out of red-hot metal, that warps your perception of time, but knifemakers seem to work to a different clock to the rest of the world. There was a considerable wait before our meeting could begin. Jon lopes in first. He’s covered in the film that varnishes anyone who works with grinders – a mix of oil, dirt, metal dust and rust.
I ask how they’d started knifemaking...
JW: James and I were living in the same house and we had some free time on our hands. We got into doing these DIY projects, I guess you would call them, over the weekends, just to pass the time. We tried to build a welder out of a microwave; we made a meat smoker, a barbecue; we had this hot-tub jacuzzi thing going in the garden. I was doing my PhD in philosophy and I spent many hours just over a computer or book. If you spend too long staring at the screen you kind of get this itch in your fingers. So, I guess I needed some sort of relief from that constant thinking.
Between our projects, we would look at a lot of stuff on the Internet, on YouTube. If, last week, you tried to make a barbecue and a welder, YouTube will automatically recommend for you, ‘How about this video? How about a knife?’ I’m not necessarily proud of it, but yes, that’s the way it happened. We didn’t set out with an idea in mind. We watched the video and we thought this might be an interesting project.
I was also working as a carpenter at the time, doing furniture recycling – ‘upcycling’, they called it – and JRH was working as a welder. We were working in jobs where you need a lot of expensive tools and machinery and where there’s little hope of setting up on your own. But knifemaking felt like all you needed was an anvil and a hammer and fire and you’re good to go, or so we thought. So, one Sunday we got a load of old files from Peckham market and some scrap bits of steel, laid them out, and tried to make a Damascus billet.
* …rather than buying pre-forged ‘blanks’ from specialist suppliers.
To anyone who’s spent time around knifemakers, this is an almost laughably naïve idea. Most will cheerfully talk for hours about how long they took beating scrap into rough, failed blades before they ever dreamed they could tackle the complexities of Damascus, but this seemed to have escaped the Blenheim Boys…
We hadn’t done nearly enough research and had no idea about the intricacies. We didn’t know anything about anything. We used the wrong methods, the wrong temperatures, but it worked out, for some reason, doing all the wrong things and we had a finished knife. It shouldn’t have happened, really. And that gave us motivation. Because it was so easy to do that, we thought, ‘Oh, let’s make a whole set of them’, and started thinking of different sizes. Then we spent over a year trying to reproduce that initial success, because we made the forge at home, and we got a tiny anvil, and we just couldn’t do it. We’d say, ‘Okay, we’ll try a different temperature’, and it was just the first billet that welded that gave us this feeling, ‘Oh, this is really easy to do.’
It was an amazing stroke of luck. There was every chance, if that first experiment had failed, that they’d have moved on to brewing or spoon carving, but knifemaking had got under their skins…
We might never have tried again, or, maybe twice, three times more and said, ‘No, this is way too complicated’, and gone on to the next thing. But, when you succeed the first time, you know you can do it; it’s that easy. That insane belief that you could spend an hour and you’ve got a knife fuelled a whole year of frustrations. It took us into a pretty dark place in the end. We’d prep a billet, go to work, come back, not even change clothes, go on out to the garden, light the forge and try and weld it. That would fail. You'd go to sleep, having nightmares about steel and fire just destroying itself. All the intensity of your studying transposed completely into thumping metal.
James and Richard enter the café oblivious to the consternation of the neatly groomed clientele. They’ve been shifting a huge power hammer to their new workshop and, frankly, they make Jon look clean.
JRH: It was quite successful, actually. Could’ve been way worse.
RW: Easy enough.
JW: I quit carpentry pretty early on, but it was a while before we moved into the workshop, and a while from there before it became... before we sold anything. I think we started off giving away knives as gifts, and yes, it was a long time before we felt we had a product that was okay to sell to someone. They were gifts for a long time, and his cousins got one, my Mum.
JRH: Yes, and then we kind of started selling them on the understanding that if they went wrong, we would replace them, basically, to locals. I mean, you can’t just start making good knives straight away. You can’t suddenly produce great knives, having made one or two. You need a lot of practice at making them, and our lives are a lot better now, and we make them a lot faster, so it’s viable, but previously, the amount of hours that went into each knife was a lot longer, and there’s some massive learning curves as well.
RW: It’s partly the tools, to start with. If we’d had 20 grand to spend on tools on day one, then it would’ve happened a lot quicker.
JRH: But it wouldn’t have been the best way of doing it. I think the process we took, we probably learnt a lot more. We wouldn’t have known what the right tools were, for starters.
JW: Looking back, we could have cut a lot of that time just going and learning it professionally with someone, but we had this whole process of experimentation learning to do it ourselves. That meant being able to recognise many of the mistakes that you can make. We also had a certain privilege that none of us really needed this to succeed really fast, or we were not... I mean, we’ve got reasonable rent where we live, things like that...
JRH: Yes, it didn’t matter, really. The workshop rent’s quite cheap and for the first year the sales we made paid the bills and what was left over just went into tools. We still had our part-time jobs so it was like it didn’t matter. Before I went full-time I was doing three days a week welding. I kind of just ran out of money when we started making money. That means starting to pay yourself, rather than buying more tools. J W: …organic growth, I guess.
There are enough dreadlocks in the room that I feel able to ask the uncomfortably New Age question: does a knife have anything like a spirit?
JRH: I’d say they’re all different. It starts from th
e beginning, every hammer strike is in a slightly different place, and then when you’re grinding it, you’re looking at where the core is, and if the hammering’s different, then you have to adjust for that. At the very beginning of the process, when you’re squashing the steel in the press, that is essentially affecting how it’s going to look at the end. So, those initial strikes and squashes determine everything. We’ve changed our process quite a lot, experimenting with different things, and the results are definitely different. It’s a lot of learning, but I think we’re at the stage where our knives are coming out consistently good.
So is a particular style developing from their work together?
JRH: I think we’ve always had a kind of vague idea of what we wanted our knives to be like. No fancy handles, just quite simple, focussing on the blade rather than anything else.
They’re Japanese-style, but we wouldn’t pretend to call ourselves ‘Japanese knifemakers’. I think Damascus techniques existed all over the world,* I don’t know why this has happened, but in more recent history it’s become associated with Japan.
J W: The shapes of the blades and the angles of the sharpening, the handles, those things are, I guess, Japanese-influenced.
JRH: Well, and the steel types, as well.
JW: The steel, yes, the hardness of the steel, things like that are Japanese-influenced, or inspired.
At the moment, there’s a queue, months long, for a Blenheim Forge knife. Celebrities are having them custom-made. The media have caught on to the ruffian charm of these three photogenically grubby young men making beautiful objects. I wonder what the plan is… TV… retail… licensing deals… What’s the Exit Strategy?
JW: More knives.
JRH: Keep going, I think. Keep going. Anyone got any other plans?
JW: No.
RW: Not really.
JRH: I think we’ll stick with kitchen knives for a good while; that’s kind of our thing, I suppose.
RW: …just, sort of, building up a reputation and maintaining it.
JRH: I think so, yes. We’re still learning a lot. We’re definitely still improving. Daily, weekly, we’re improving.
* The name ‘Damascus’ has complicated and curious roots. It was originally a pattern in metalwork from Damascus in Syria which had been forged from a steel called ‘Wootz’ imported from India. The steel was refined by an arcane process, now long lost, which involved sealing iron ore in clay crucibles and firing them at high temperatures. The resulting ingots were full of impurities and composed of iron and various steel alloys, but these formed in layers which both strengthened the metal and gave it beautiful markings. Modern Damascus steel attempts to mimic the original Wootz by layering carefully selected steel alloys and crushing them together under great heat and pressure until they form a similar ‘wafer’ structure, a process more accurately called ‘Pattern Welding’. The assembled billets of metal can be twisted, cut, punched, folded or otherwise distressed during forging to create a variety of patterns. Metallurgists constantly try to emulate Wootz without much success so, until they get it right, we’ll have to content ourselves with our own, beautiful ‘Damascus’.
JON WARSHAWSKY
JAMES ROSS-HARRIS
RICHARD WARNER
ON THE COOK’S KNIVES
IN A ROLL, A TOOL BOX, on a rack or stuffed in a drawer, your set of knives is more than the sum of its parts. They might have been inherited or quietly nicked from other cooks, complicated and expensive purchases may have been made, but however you come by your knives, your kit is in an active process of evolution. A useless knife is got rid of, a damaged one either rejected or coaxed back into productive life. You might sharpen them obsessively or feel a constant, nagging, low-grade guilt that you ‘really ought to get round to’ a spot of maintenance. As your skills develop, you’ll outgrow old favourites, aspire to new ones and eventually acquire them. No wonder people get obsessed about their roll… it’s a chillingly accurate snapshot of their character.
There always seems to be a master knife in the kit, the one that’s in your hand the most. The classic chef ’s knife, based on the time-honoured French pattern, is the master knife in our culinary tradition. This makes sense because most high-quality Western cooking – at least as far as it’s formally trained – is based on French. A modern chef could pick up Escoffier’s knife and use it easily, and he would, had he got his hands on one, have been very comfortable with the contemporary version.
The curved blade rocks to mince meat and herbs, the length enables slices to be cut from big slabs of protein, the handle sits high so knuckles clear the cutting board. Chefs pride themselves on being able to do almost anything they need in the kitchen with just the one knife. It’s perhaps unsurprising that buying a chef ’s knife is the first thing one does on self-defining as a serious cook. Sure, your mum had knives, you probably used one or two in grubby kitchens as a student, but the day you go out and intentionally drop £50 or more on a knife is the day you declare to the world that you’re not just someone who makes dinner, you’re now a cook.
Elizabeth David is often credited with relaunching serious cooking in the UK after the war and she saw the knife as key to taking cooking seriously. Though stainless-steel kitchen knives were available, she preferred the French provincial favourite, carbon steel – softer and easier to sharpen. Many older cooks still have a soft spot for the Davidian Sabatier with which they discovered garlic, olives and lemons – conveniently forgetting that the blade rusted like a bugger and turned the lemons black – and very few have survived the intervening sixty years of enthusiastic sharpening.
Today, the professional chef ’s knife is more likely to have been made in Germany than in France, with Wüsthof and Henckels the two main competitors in the field. They are so beautifully, so scientifically manufactured that notions of individual ‘craftsmanship’ seem strangely distant. Their efficiency is total, their finish so flawless that it seems impossible to imagine that a human was involved in their creation and that is, in a strange way, reassuring. Like some gleaming component of an aircraft I’m flying in, I kind of don’t want to believe that these knives were beaten into shape by a bloke with a hammer.
The secondary knives in the rack are the ones that do things the big knife can’t. Boning and filleting require thinner, more flexible blades and often there will be a knife designed for an altogether different type of cutting – the kind of ‘toward-the-thumb’ whittling that works so well on vegetables. There’s no way the 8-inch knife can be wielded that way: the deep throat that enables the knuckles to clear the chopping board puts the cutting edge in quite the wrong place.
The standard roll for a culinary student today will probably include the chef ’s knife, a boner, a flexible filleter, a paring knife and a turning knife.
Beyond this most cooks accumulate ‘special’ knives. Weird one-off specials that do one thing too well to ignore. Old-school classically trained pros will have a couple of melon ballers. These spoon-shaped cutters were routinely stolen from the pastry chef because they were so fast at coring tomatoes and cucumbers. I know one chef who keeps her grandfather’s pocket knife just for removing the eyes from potatoes. I’m a great fan of the devilled kidney so I keep a small pair of locking forceps and a 10a scalpel for efficiently whipping out the fibrous cores.
The last thing in the kit will be an old favourite. A knife that’s lived its life too well and too long and should really, by rights,
have been retired years ago. But it’s hard… really hard... to say goodbye to a tool you’ve loved and used. A tool you’ve adapted to use, whose shape you’ve formed. One that’s given blameless and brilliant service.
There will always be that single old stager because, though all tools are about efficiency, function and fitness for purpose, knives have an extra emotional dimension. It’s the part that demands that we care for our knives and it’s the part that gives us a kind of ‘pride in the roll’.
CHEF’S KNIFE
BLADE LENGTH: 200MM/260MM
OVERALL LENGTH: 330MM/450MM
WEIGHT: 222G/340G
MANUFACTURED BY: WÜSTHOF
MATERIALS: FORGED CROMOV STEEL WITH A ROCKWELL
HARDNESS OF 56, POLYMER
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: GERMANY
USES: GENERAL PURPOSE
THE WÜSTHOF DREIZACK CLASSIC 4584 RANGE are possibly the most desirable of all French-pattern kitchen knives. They’re wider than standard, making the knife heavier and giving just over an extra centimetre of clearance at the throat – good if you have big hands. Like most German manufacturers, Wüsthof favour a bolster design which makes a proper ‘pinch’ grip on the back of the blade more comfortable over a long day’s work.
The 8-inch is a gorgeously balanced knife and makes chopping a pleasure, but in skilled hands even the 10-inch – a monstrous great culinary ‘Excalibur’ – is as truly multi-purpose a tool as a cai dao. In a single shift a professional will use it for everything from chiffonading herbs, through boning a chicken and then back to brunoising carrots at high speed. The back (‘spine’) of the blade is used to crush herbs, the side to smash garlic to a pulp and the tip sharp enough for delicate surgical tasks like whipping out chicken oysters.