Then the very least you can do is buy me this piece of cold steel as an early gift…
It’s a Santoku blade, available from this rather handsome (and scarily talented) trio at Blenheim Forge in Hackney.
There’s whole lifetimes that could be spent on and with knives. And I will be writing some more about them, but not here today. Suffice to say for this post, that this particular blade is forged from folded iron with a blue paper steel core (in Japan, that’s Aogami), the same composition as is frequently used in Japanese katana (“swords”) all safely wrapped into a handle made of walnut burr with a solid copper ferrule. Beautiful. Long lasting. Sharp as all fuck. And can be kept that way.
There’s fascinating (PDF) couple of pages from Foodism covering their history and some well photographed illustrations on their production process.
Féted by Tim Hayward in his book, “Knife” that I mentioned here, they’ll no doubt be even more popular now that’s been on the shelves for a year. So, what are you waiting for? Off you go and order me one of those beauties at the top of the page. Stat! I’ll even save you the money on the postage and will go and pick it up from the boys in their workshop under their Hackney railway arch. Can’t say fairer than that now, can I?
Oh, and can you make sure that my blade comes from the box on the right? OK. Thanks. Bye.
