No knives, only cook knives

https://kellykozakandjoshdonald.substack.com/p/no-knives-only-cook-knives

by firloop • 6 months ago

124 85 6 months ago

kellykozakandjoshdonald.substack.com

darknavi• 6 months ago

I enjoy seeing glimpse into other people's niche hobbies.

I really enjoy markets like they describe and I've experienced them in Asia, but I have no idea where I'd find one in WA State.

rpearl• 6 months ago

This niche hobby became https://bernalcutlery.com/ which is a fairly successful Bay Area knife store

eps2• 6 months ago

They also have an excellent book, covering both the subject matter (knives and sharpening) and how the company came to be.

Somewhat similar to the book of the Blue Bottle founder on coffee and his company path. Both are basically, as the GP remarked, are glimpses into other people's passion and deep fascination with a certain subject. Fantastic reads IMO.

* In fact, let me add two more books - Ivan Ramen and Tartine Bread. Similar introductions into lives of people and their obsessions with a specific subject.

https://www.amazon.com/Sharp-Definitive-Introduction-Sharpen...

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Bottle-Craft-Coffee-Roasting/dp/...

https://www.amazon.com/Ivan-Ramen-Obsession-Recipes-Unlikely...

https://www.amazon.com/Tartine-Bread-Chad-Robertson/dp/08118...

If anyone knows other books of the same nature, I'm all ears.

scelerat• 6 months ago

Good people too. a friend of mine used to babysit for them

DeathArrow• 6 months ago

I find ebay being overpriced if you are into collecting stuff so flea markets can be an option if you don't want to overpay.

b-kuiper• 6 months ago

i also find, with the arrival of catawiki (more a european market?), nice products for regular/normal prices seems hard to come by nowadays. Our "local" online market (marktplaats.nl) is therefore losing its value, local (town/neighborhood) (whats)app groups seem to somewhat take over this roll within the digital space.

jorvi3• 6 months ago

This is a general trend worldwide.

OP's writing is nice, but he is de facto a scalper looking for the maximum amount of arbitrage. There's enough of them, like mentioned in the article, that they'll pick any flea market or secondhand store clean off diamonds in the rough before you as a regular guy really get a chance to find any.

What they're doing isn't illegal or forbidden, but it has completely destroyed the spirit of flea markets and secondhand stores as quaint places. And in response to becoming as hypercapitalist as the rest of society, a large contingent of people on flea markets has started to offer whole tables stuffed with cheap AliExpress / Temu crap. Or AI art being sold as "handmade".

The enthusiast offering artisanal coffee or lemonade or cinnamon rolls from his stall or food truck has quadrupled his prices, because if everyone else is gouging the visitor, why shouldn't he?

The same goes for secondhand clothing stores. They're wise to the scalpers looking to flip stuff on Vinted or whatever, so they have also doubled or even tripled their prices. It's an open secret that a lot of stores let the girls working there have a first lookover of whatever comes in.

mgaunard4• 6 months ago

French knives are far behind Japanese ones, be it in metallurgy or design.

ekianjo• 6 months ago

Agree. There is a whole industry in Japan around knives that is much bigger than the French one.

tclancy2• 6 months ago

Pfft. The knives in my kitchen are all original Damascus steel I use them to make food from recipes that were lost to time as well.

KaiserPro2• 6 months ago

I love that all my food now tastes of rust and light oil.

salomonk_mur• 6 months ago

If you haven't got a few Mithril knives then you are no connoisseur at all.

giorgioz• 6 months ago

Guys guys please. Adamantium knives or get the hell out of my kitchen!

ansgri• 6 months ago

There are now inexpensive Japanese-style knives from China. I have a couple of surprisingly well-made Xinzuo-branded knives, each under $50.

PunchyHamster3• 6 months ago

I got one few months ago. Still haven't even had to sharpen it, I'm honestly pretty impressed

throw0101c• 6 months ago

For a practical guide to which knives to buy, American's Test Kitchen gives pretty good advice:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st6LggwoL_4

* https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/8204-three-esse...

* Under USD 75: https://archive.is/https://www.americastestkitchen.com/equip...

For most daily needs: chef's knife, pairing knife, serated/bread knife. Possibly useful 'extras': kitchen shears, petty/utility, boning, slicing/carving. They do not recommend sets.

hylaride• 6 months ago

I consider good shears to be a daily requirement (they double as random available scissors as well). Specialty knives are really only worth it if you use it for its intended purpose at least once a week. We do have two chef knives as it allows simultaneous work to be done with my spouse, though.

More important is learning proper knife skills, including maintenance and sharpening. Even the best knives need to be taken care of.

buescher• 6 months ago

Kitchen shears and a boning knife were “why did I wait this long” tools for me.

throwaway1737382• 6 months ago

Especially when I have to prep green beans

dessimus• 6 months ago

Kitchen shears but with a 4 ft chain to keep them near the sink to wash them, preventing so family stops taking them into other rooms and using to open shipping packing, cutting clothing tags, etc.

duxup• 6 months ago

The nice thing about these affordable but still good quality knives is that I can simply use them or be rough with them and it's all good. They sharpen up nicely and I don't have to baby them (right in the dishwasher they go, that's right, the dishwasher).

m0llusk• 6 months ago

The swipe against IKEA at the end seems out of place. In my experience IKEA knives have decent materials, design, and build quality despite the low price point. Maybe this is an artifact of the author's focus on resale value? IKEA knives have a low initial acquisition cost which contributes to extremely low resale prices, but they seem to function well and much better than Forgecraft knives.

Freak_NL3• 6 months ago

No kidding. Most of our knifes are the same IKEA ones we bought fifteen years ago. Honing steel, whetstone and the occasional coat of oil for the wood part of the handle and they just last. I can understand the brand might dilute the resale value because IKEA tends to have a broad range of quality/cost in the line-up.

throwaway1737382• 6 months ago

Ikea is very heavily a “value for money” company in my eyes. Their cheapest furniture in each category is basically pressed sawmill garbage but it will withstand everything but moving. If you move up in price the stuff actually gets better, not just fancier.

currydove• 6 months ago

Agreed! I have had an IKEA Slitbar Santoku since 2014, it's been abused (even tossed in the dishwasher a couple of time because I didn't value it at the time) and it has outlasted most of my other knives. Not to mention, it's my preferred knife when I pull out my drawer.

So much so, that I went out of my way to get the longer chef knife/gyuto version of it off eBay last year! It's freaking fantastic! They're both well maintained now, honed often and my two go-to knives over a wusthof and bunch of Misen knives

mikkupikku2• 6 months ago

I had a hell of a time buying a new whetstone for my kitchen knives recently. I didn't want to buy online and I also didn't want to get ripped off. Walmart and Target had nothing but those shitty little widgets you pull a knife through to fuck it up. Home Despot and Lowes only had those and also bizarre sharpening contraptions that included wetstones but also other nonsense to justify bumping the price to north of $50. I finally found what I was looking for, just a regular whetstone with no bells and whistles, for about $3 at harbor freight.

My conclusion is that very few normies care about edge quality and most of those that do are making some sort of hobby out of it and want to buy something excessively fancy. See also Japanese knives; I'm sure they're very nice but two minutes with a whetstone will get any shitty piece of metal sharp enough to cut some chicken. There's no reason to overthink this stuff.

nine_k• 6 months ago

My no-frills set of two large whetstones (4 grades) cost me north of $70 in a pro restaurant store like 20 years ago. They are still in a good shape, and can make my knives razor-sharp with little effort. Even the knife I bought for $5 in a local supermarket.

metalman• 6 months ago

no need to overthink is the truth I make a wide assortment of edge tools and sharpen them,including damascus, and regularly sharpen whatever is dull, drill bits, lathe tools, planer blades, etc etc, by hand or with power equipment. And in moments of need, like not having a long enough wood bit, I have hand ground a long bolt, into a wood bit, no thinking, just doing.

mmh00002• 6 months ago

You didn’t want to buy online but then were happy with the poorest quality stone harbor freight had to offer? That’s an odd choice.

There are many quality whetstones to choose from and a lot of debate on the absolute best. But TLDR, KING is generally highly rated:

https://www.hocho-knife.com/king/

SoftTalker3• 6 months ago

Harbor Freight has random decent stuff. Maybe the whetstone was one of them.

foobarian• 6 months ago

Curious what your techniques are to keep the angle consistent. I've been sharpening manually by always using the same thumb position under the blade but there is always a little wiggle that bugs me.

random_ind_dude• 6 months ago

You can buy an angle guide like the one below to keep the angle consistent while sharpening.

https://www.amazon.com/Accurate-Whetstone-Sharpener-Effortle...

SoftTalker3• 6 months ago

You need to look at professional chefs supply for stuff like this, not Walmart or Amazon.

If there's a local community college or trade school with a culinary program, they might sell stuff like this or at least be able to direct you to suppliers.

mikkupikku2• 6 months ago

All I wanted was a flat rock though, not some expensive specialty thing. I've concluded there is no longer any market for simple practical things like that; the market got bifurcated between people who want some expensive bit of hobby kit and people who don't care about sharp knives at all.

giardini3• 6 months ago

I sharpen my kitchen knives the same way I sharpen my lawnmower blades: out front on the curb (mine is concrete). Grind until it's sharp. Once I was out-of-pocket but luckily my host had a rock garden.

Normies DO care about edge quality but they DON'T care about fiddling with fancy "whetstones" and "diamond sharpeners" and such. Sharpen it, clean with soap and water, dry and burn it (to remove the rabies and typhus) and wipe it down with olive oil, mmmmm!

eh_why_not• 6 months ago

...and burn it (to remove the rabies and typhus)...

Elaborate? You heat your knives after every sharpening?

eps2• 6 months ago

bizarre sharpening contraptions

https://www.tsprof.eu wants a word

webstrand• 6 months ago

I've tried simple whetstones, and haven't yet got the knack of not dulling knives on it. The bizarre sharpening contraptions take the knack out of it, same as the pull-through knife mutilators. It may not be the best, but it is better than it was. Unlike a whetstone where you may very well end up with a knife duller than when you started, if you don't have the knack for keeping an angle or removing the burr or any number of other ways to mess up.

convolvatron3• 6 months ago

My shop is next to the flea market described in the article, I’m really surprised that so many people that live in sf don’t know about it. It’s a really interesting way to spend an hour, and you see a really broad swath of San Francisco residents. plenty of vinyl, other collectibles, hand tools, antiques, ‘antiques’, ephemera from the 70s, strange old electronics, etc. alemeny near bayshore at the farmers market. Every Sunday, pretty much over by noon

pimlottc• 6 months ago

Which flea market is that?

quesera• 6 months ago

Alemany.

I haven't been there in (way) too long, but there used to be a great pierogi vendor -- so even on cold rainy mornings (too common) you'd at least get some warm delicious breakfast.

vl• 6 months ago

The article says you need to show there at 5 am though.

convolvatron3• 6 months ago

just to get the best pickings. most of this stuff comes from storage units.

prpl• 6 months ago

I assume he also meant the Alameda Antiques Fair as well.

JennyWeston• 6 months ago

my current favorite kitchen scissors / sheers: https://www.amazon.com/CANARY-Cardboard-Scissors-Blue-PS-650...

I tried a bunch of kitchen sheers. They lacked leverage. These cut bones with ease.

No knives, only cook knives

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