by Tim Hayward
Laguiole, like Sabatier, is actually not a trademark name but an indicator of a style of knife made in the French city of Thiers. They can vary massively in quality. The second knife from the left is an elderly Laguiole that’s particularly useful for outdoor grilling. The extra-long blade means that it has to be stored in a purpose-built sheath, but it unfolds into a creditable, though rusty, carving knife.
Next along is the high-quality, traditionally shaped Laguiole which I keep in the glove compartment of the car for culinary emergencies on the road. Next to that, a chunkier clasp knife, also in Laguiole style, which is good for cheese that puts up a fight. On the right is a Spanish blade with an olivewood handle. It bears no maker’s name but can make extremely short work of the hardest chorizo.
At the bottom is an obscenely expensive folding knife and fork set from French cutler, Claude Dozorme. It’s a beautiful thing but I can’t help feeling that if you need a knife and fork, you should probably be eating indoors.
INDIAN MARKET KNIVES
OVERALL LENGTH: VARIOUS
MANUFACTURED BY: HANDMADE
MATERIALS: WASTE AND BROKEN SAW BLADES, AUTOMOTIVE LEAF SPRINGS, SCRAP PIPE AND WOOD FROM PACKING CASES AND PALLETS
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: INDIA
USES: ALL PURPOSES
THIS BUNDLE OF KNIVES was picked up in a street market in Jodhpur for 2,000 rupees from the elderly woman who manufactured them, but they might easily have come from a market almost anywhere on the planet. Anywhere there are factories or garages, tool steel is recycled daily. The blades on the left are made from broken hacksaw blades or the leaf springs from scrap cars. They’ve been sharpened either on a stone or a rudimentary sharpening wheel and the blades are ‘riveted’ to the handle with nails or wire.
India doesn’t have a distinctive, indigenous culinary knife, so it’s interesting how these – like French or Japanese knives – have evolved out of grips and cutting actions. The pointy knife on the right can obviously make long slicing actions like a yanagiba and has enough knuckle clearance to be held in a ‘hammer’ grip. The second knife is a chopper in the traditions of the usuba or the cai dao. The remaining three, with no knuckle clearance and round handles, are designed to be used off the board in the ‘cutting-towards-the-thumb’ style.
DAO BAO
BLADE LENGTH: 116MM
OVERALL LENGTH: 225MM
WEIGHT: 47G
MANUFACTURED BY: HANDMADE
MATERIALS: SCRAP SAW BLADE, LOCAL WOOD, BRASS
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: THAILAND
USES: PEELING AND SHREDDING HARD VEGETABLES AND FRUIT AT ROADSIDES OR STALLS
THE DAO BAO is a vegetable paring knife from South-East Asia and a perfect example of a global family of knives with a ‘guarded’ blade that controls how deep it can penetrate. In one sense this is the mechanism of a spiralizer or mandoline, mounted on a handle.
Passing the knife along the surface of a hard vegetable produces a long ribbon of material – just like a simpler version of Japanese katsuramuki rotary cutting – which makes it ideal for reducing a challenging root into something that’s pleasantly palatable as a salad. It also, of course, makes it an ideal tool for fast, accurate peeling. In fact, the dao bao is a direct relative of your mum’s old-school potato peeler or even the commercial ‘speed peeler’ beloved of pro chefs.
The dao bao, unlike other knives, is also influenced by the posture adopted while using it. It’s popular with street traders who may well prepare food outdoors, in a squatting position, paring veg straight on to a plate or into a pot.
This dao bao has a second blade along one edge which can be used for more regular chopping on a board.
FRUIT AND VEG CARVING KNIVES
KEENLY PRICED AT UNDER £40 ON EBAY, this Chinese-made fruit and veg carving outfit might be the cheapest set of knives you can get that you didn’t know you need.
Across China, Japan and South-East Asia, vegetable carving is part of an elegant table setting and chefs take the opportunity to display incredible creativity in biomass-based flights of fancy that echo the great pièces montées of Antonin Carême.
You can do some pretty neat work with a small paring knife and a scalpel but this kit also contains dozens of tiny chisels, gouges, whittlers and turners, along with templates and cutters appropriate to a variety of Chinese social occasions.
Buy a kit and experiment. If you use potatoes you can always boil and mash your failures. You may never use 75 per cent of the tools in the box, even if you can work out how you’re supposed to, but you’ll find dozens of ways to use the rest.
A good example of this is the melon baller, that odd chrome job in the middle of the case with two hemispherical spoon ends. On the face of it this is the most fatuous of tools, almost the definition of pointlessly mimsy kitchen gadget. After all, who balls melons, these days… who ever did? And yet, in most classically trained cooks’ knife rolls you’ll find one or two, squirrelled away. Like tiny ice-cream scoops with sharpened edges, though they may have originally been intended to make decorative fruit spheres, they make themselves useful in dozens of ways in the professional kitchen; removing pips and pulp from tomatoes, stripping the seeds from halved cucumbers, neatly deseeding melons, scraping the pith from citrus peel and removing the eyes from potatoes and even, we are told, pigs’ heads.
JAMONERO/SALMON SLICER
BLADE LENGTH: 320MM
OVERALL LENGTH: 435MM
WEIGHT: 141G
MANUFACTURED BY: GLOBAL
MATERIALS: CROMOVA18 STAINLESS STEEL
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: JAPAN
USE: DISPLAY CARVING
THIS MODERN SLICER is made by Global, one of the first Japanese companies to export knives to the West. Fine jamón ibérico on the bone and Scottish smoked wild salmon are both high-status foods that demand careful slicing as close as possible to the time of serving as well as a certain amount of tableside theatre; the long, thin, wickedly sword-like slicer is just the tool for the job.
Like the sashimi cutting blades, the slicer is long, allowing a slice to be taken with a single stroke and avoiding unpleasant ‘sawing’ marks on the cut surface of the food.
The blade is flexible so it can be bent flat against the inside of the salmon skin at the end of the stroke. Because the blade runs parallel to skin and bone, it need never touch them, or indeed, the cutting board. A slicer, therefore, if used carefully, can be given a much more acute and ultimately sharp grind than other knives because it’s never going to be traumatised by hard stuff.
MANDOLINE
BLADE LENGTH: 100MM
OVERALL LENGTH: 390MM
WEIGHT: 1600G
MANUFACTURED BY: BRON-COUKE
MATERIALS: STAINLESS STEEL
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: FRANCE
USES: FINE SLICING AND SHREDDING OF VEGETABLES FRUIT CHEESE
FEW CUTTING DEVICES cause such terror in the kitchen as the mandoline. It should be a lovely thing – a captive knife blade, safely fixed in a protective frame, over which food is slid. The blade is covered and its depth is adjustable, much like an upturned wood plane. It should be a safer way to cut than a big, ugly naked knife. In truth, the mandoline is so open to misuse that almost everyone who’s ever used one has cut themselves in a memorably unpleasant way.
Used with care and with a guard, a mandoline can make immaculately thin slices of vegetable that would shame even the most adept commis chef. It can also be used to cut a corrugated ‘wavy’ edge, and a range of vertical ‘comb’ blades can be swit
ched which, at a single pass, turn the slices into fine julienne.
The traditional French model* is a heavy, beautifully engineered piece of chrome-plated kitchen sculpture. It’s also a bear to clean.
* I’ve always kept my French mandoline in its original, bloodstained box. It reminds me to use the guard every time.
JAPANESE MANDOLINES
BLADE LENGTH: 90MM
OVERALL LENGTH: 310MM
WEIGHT: 259G
MANUFACTURED BY: BENRINER
MATERIALS: STAINLESS STEEL, PLASTIC
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: TAIWAN
USES: FINE SLICING AND SHREDDING OF VEGETABLES
KATSURAMUKI is a knife technique unique to Japanese cuisine.* It’s fiendishly difficult, however, and those super-thin slices and shreds are still required even in home cooking, so a mandoline is exactly the right tool. Not the big, intimidating chrome number, beloved of the French, but a light, plastic, domestic version that does the whole job just as well, just as fast and costs only pennies. These are so efficient that many western chefs now use them in place of a traditional mandoline.
Perhaps because even a plastic mandoline cuts fingers, the Japanese have also come up with the ‘turning slicer’ in which the vegetable is mounted on a rotating axle and then offered up to a fixed blade. The original type (below) holds the veg vertically and cuts the face, but there are other versions where the vegetable rotates horizontally while the blade is applied to the side – more accurately replicating katsuramuki but only useable on daikon and a few other cylindrical veg.
Turning slicers were briefly discovered by the ‘healthy eating’ crowd and re-marketed as expensive ‘spiralizers’. In these more enlightened times you should be able to pick one up for next to nothing.
* See description.
MEZZALUNA
BLADE LENGTH: 286MM
OVERALL LENGTH: 286MM
WEIGHT: 260G
MANUFACTURED BY: A.L.O.
MATERIALS: CARBON STEEL, OLIVEWOOD
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: UNKNOWN
USES: FINE CHOPPING OF MEAT, HERBS, NUTS
MEZZALUNA MEANS ‘HALF MOON’, the Italian name for a two-handled semi-circular knife with a rocking action. Small mezzalunas* are usually reserved for chopping nuts, herbs and garlic and can have one, two or occasionally three parallel blades. There is also a version with a single handle, mounted in the middle of the blade that comes with a special dished wooden chopping bowl – sometimes called a ‘hachinette’. In this incarnation they fit into the nice-but-pointless class of kitchen gadgetry as they offer no advantage in terms of function or efficiency over a regular knife and are a complete pain to clean and store.
Larger mezzalunas though, single-bladed, substantial and sharp, can be used to mince meat. The French, in fact, call them ‘hachoirs’ and, because they operate with a downwards slicing action instead of the forced mashing and extrusion of the mincing machine, they produce a coarser mince with cuboid chunks that retain more juice. A hachoir will produce better steak tartare and far juicier burgers than any other tool or appliance.
* Berceuses in French.
ON BEING CUT
EVERY ONE OF US WHO USES A KNIFE WILL, at some point, have cut themselves. To call it an ‘accident’ seems foolish because we know it’s going to happen. Amateurs cut themselves because they don’t have enough skill but professionals cut themselves just as much because the skills they have learned mean using the knife faster and more often. There are acts of stupidity to be avoided – cutting food that’s improperly held, trying to catch a falling blade, using the knife for a purpose it was never intended, leaving a blade in the wrong place. It might even be possible to avoid getting cut altogether by buying in more pre-cut ingredients, or perhaps using food preparation gadgets and machines, laden with safety guards, cut-outs and plastered with warning notices. There are perfectly serviceable cut-proof gloves, but most cooks would rather die the Death of a Thousand Cuts than go down that route. It would detach them, they’d say, from a tactile relationship with the food.
Cuts, then, ‘go with the territory’.
We are only cooks; when you cut us, do we not bleed? Like everyone else we feel the initial, almost acid burn of the blade passing through skin laden with nerve endings. But then something entirely different sets in. When you ask cooks about their cuts, it’s never the pain they recall. They’ll talk about the blood. These days, when chefs get drunk, they often whip out their phones to show pictures of the latest gory flap of skin hidden under a blue plaster.* Or they’ll talk about how they dealt with it and got straight back to work.
The level of machismo involved can be foolish. In the heat of service, cooks will wrap a wound in cling film or a rubber glove and keep going – often, thereby, missing the vital time window in which a serious cut can still be viably stitched. Insane resilience in the face of an injury that would floor a civilian is one of the many unhealthy behavioural traits by which chefs continue to define themselves.† Chefs often speak of cauterising a cut on the hotplate and continuing to work.‡
From outside the professional kitchen, this kind of behaviour looks absurd. It is counterintuitive to worsen a wound rather than immediately ameliorating it, and yet, as we build relationships with our own knives, even those of us who cook for fun rather than a profession begin to change our attitude.
* Blue, or ‘disclosing’ plasters are used in kitchens so they can be easily spotted if they drop off into food. In large factories they also have metal tape woven through them, like the strip in a banknote, so they can be picked up by metal detectors.
† In Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell is famously baffled by the kitchen obsession with physical ‘hardness’, with being, as the slang of the time had it, ‘débrouillard’.
‡ I used to believe this was a myth but I’ve now seen it happen enough times to know it’s horribly true.
A key part of learning to sharpen a knife is testing the edge. In the beginning you cut newspaper to check that you’ve got a good edge but pretty soon you find yourself doing what the pros do, placing your thumb on the spine of the knife and feeling the edge with the balls of three fingers. Initially, it’s terrifying. Most of your mental faculties, for very sensible reasons, are working to make you withdraw your body from the threat. Yet the feeling of control as you test the razor edge – just catching in the cornified outer layers of skin, never penetrating, the microscopic irregularities scratching against the loops and whorls of your fingerprint – is that of almost literally ‘dancing on the edge’.
Even now, as you read this, I’m prepared to bet that you’re looking at the scars on your own hands. Fading traces of thin white lines, a knotty little cicatrice where a slipped knife caught the nail. Oddly I’m looking at a place on my left hand where I once suffered a monstrous slash – a proper A&E job – and I realise it’s healed without trace. I feel robbed. All that mess and nothing to show for it.
To own, love and properly use a knife is to feel that you’ve overcome your fear of it, learned to master it, yet it has lost none of its potency in the transaction. The cut becomes a symbol of the delicate line you’ve walked. For all the times you have taken your knife in your hand and it worked for you beautifully it is still capable of turning on you. In other parts of our lives we usually correct, avoid or dispose of things that hurt us but in this sense our relationship with the knife is like the one we have with a particularly favoured or thoroughbred pet. It’s okay if it occasionally bites or kicks. It shows s
pirit… it’s how it is.
HOW TO SHARPEN
PUTTING THE CUTTING EDGE on to the blade is a two-stage process of abrading (to create the edge) and aligning. You could call these processes, with pleasing rhyme, ‘stoning and honing’.
To make an edge on a blade where there currently isn’t one, a little metal must be removed from each side. It must be ground into a wedge. This can be done with all sorts of abrasive materials like the carborundum belts on a linisher, a wheel or block made with diamond dust or the more delicate ‘water stone’. The important thing is that the material is harder than the steel of the blade and has a rough enough surface to cut.
Water stones can be naturally occuring rock, cut into flat panels or a ceramic equivalent. The important thing about them is that they have a plane surface, can be soaked in water to keep them cool during grinding and are available in a variety of grades of roughness.
The blade is ground with the abrasive on alternate sides, creating two flat planes at an acute angle to each other which eventually meet. As the edge gets thinner it also becomes weaker, so at the point when it is actually ‘sharp’, the kinetic forces of grinding will naturally bend the edge over to one side. This makes what’s called a ‘burr’: an edge that you can feel on one side or other of the blade. This is the point at which to stop the abrasive process. You’ve taken away as much metal as you need. If you continue grinding, you push the burr back in the opposite direction, creating a line of weakness and a thinner point just behind the edge. This is called a ‘wire edge’. The wire edge will snap off and leave a honeable edge behind – you sometimes see it when cleaning a blade during sharpening – but strictly it is removing more metal than you need to.