The Ryback folding santuko knife

Here's the scenario--you're going to someone's house where you're likely to be pressed into service in the kitchen, and you know they don't have a decent knife in the house, but you don't want to be so presumptuous or it's otherwise inconvenient to carry a knife roll. Or maybe you're going away for a weekend where you'll be cooking and you want to travel light. Of course one can always make do with what's there, but maybe there's an alternative--a folding kitchen knife.


I proposed this query to my friends on the eGullet food forum, and we came up with various ideas, but there seem to be three real, full-sized, multi-purpose folding kitchen knives out there, all in the style of the Japanese santuko, a knife of relatively modern design, the name of which means "three virtues"--slicing, dicing, and mincing--as opposed to the more specialized traditional japanese knives like the usuba for slicing vegetables or the long yanagi sashimi slicing knife.


There are some inherent design limitations in a folding kitchen knife. To be practical, the blade will be about 4-5 inches at most, and to fold properly, the handle has to be longer than the blade and the end of the handle has to come about level to the edge of the blade, meaning it must be used at the edge of the cutting board or with a small cutting board, or the end of the handle will hit the board before the knife completes its arc. The long handle also creates a balance problem, since the handle is usually shorter than the blade, and one normally wants the balance point to be around the spot where the heel of the blade meets the handle.

The knives we came up with on eGullet were the A.G. Russell Hocho, the Ryback Folder, and the beautiful Maruyoshi folding santuko. There was one very avid user of the Russell Hocho which is the least expensive of the three at around $65 and is the longest in production, but based on the photos, I liked the design of the other two. One poster bought the Maruyoshi, which has a nice wooden handle and beautiful handmade damascus blade, but it was the most expensive at about $250 from Japan Woodworker in California, and seems more to suit people who like to hold the knife with a pinch grip rather than my preferred hammer grip, which I think is better suited to a knife with a short blade.

I settled on the Ryback folder for about $100 shipped from Germany to the U.S., because I liked the fit and finish based on the photos, and the real article lives up to the photos. It also comes with a handy padded cordura pouch.


The frame lock mechanism, above, is very sturdy, but beware that there is a detente before the knife is fully open, and it is necessary to open the knife fully for the lock to be engaged.


The blade is 1-7/8 inches wide, which is wider than my Wusthof santuko shown above, and 4.5 inches long with about 4-3/8 inches of usable cutting edge. Full length from handle to tip is about 10-3/4 inches.


Out of the box the edge is comparable to the factory edge of a decent German knife, but I've come to like a finer edge, so I've made it sharper using my Japanese whetstones.



I've been using the Ryback for everything for a few days, and I've gotten used to the balance, but I still prefer my fixed blade knives given the choice. Watch the video above, though, and think about the last time you made a meal in a vacation condo with whatever dull steak knife they had in the drawer. Wouldn't this have been better? The blade holds a fine edge very nicely, and it's a real, functional kitchen knife that works like a chef's knife or a santuko.

What Knives are the Best?

A friend recently asked for knife recommendations. Weigh in! You can leave your comment on what your favorite is at the end of this post.

This is what I use almost exclusively, the Mercer Santoku. The little impressions in the blade side keep meat from sticking to the knife when slicing. I picked it up at Chez Cherie when I took a cutting class (Blog Post Here). The other little thing I picked up at this class, which has been very valuable, is this little sharpener. A swipe before cutting keeps my knife sharp.

My brother has posted several great posts about his sharpening techniques.
Check them out here (Knife Post Link)

How sharp do knives need to be?

Since last week's post about Japanese knife sharpening techniques, I've been thinking about how sharp knives need to be, and tonight it all clicked. Sharp knives, aside from being safer and more efficient to use than dull knives, make food more attractive and contribute to the texture of the final product. But how sharp is sharp enough?

I remember with my old sharpening technique, a friend who sometimes worked as a professional cook was watching me cleanly slice a ripe tomato with my chef's knife, and said, "that's a sharp knife!" and it seemed so at the time.

When I started using a Japanese waterstone instead of the oilstone, I realized that I could dice a ripe tomato neatly, stacking two or three slices, cutting them first like french fries, and then dicing them crosswise. I could dice a tomato before, but not as quickly, cleanly, and effortlessly.

Tonight I was making leftovers. I had some tomato sauce from chicken cacciatore I'd made last week, and some grilled leg of lamb, so I thought I'd cut up the lamb and make a ragout to serve over pasta. I also had some very ripe tomatoes from the farmer's market to add to the pot. Tomatoes should be peeled before going into a sauce, or the peels become like little slips of paper, and the usual way to this is by blanching them briefly in boiling water, but for two or three tomatoes, it adds a lot of extra time to boil a pot of water. With my newly refined sharpening technique, I thought I'd see if I could peel them with a knife, and I did it with very little waste using the Henckels Four-Star 8" chef's knife that I've had for around 20 years, and it took less time to peel three tomatoes than it would have taken to boil two quarts of water. Then I could take these peeled ripe tomatoes, which are even softer than unpeeled ripe tomatoes, and dice them quickly, cleanly and effortlessly.

I used to think my knives were sharp enough, but now I'm doing things that with my old technique just wouldn't have crossed my mind.

Ohe San: Japanese Knife Sharpening

For years I sharpened my knives on an oil stone--one side coarse, one side medium--holding the knife at as close to a 22.5 degree angle to the surface of the stone as I could visualize, moving it from heel to tip always in the direction of the blade to avoid feathering the edge, and it worked pretty well. My knives were pretty sharp, and people who saw me using them or joined me to cook in the kitchen generally thought my knives were pretty sharp. But lately, there has been a lot of interest in the culinary world in Japanese knives, and you have to admit that Japanese sushi chefs are masters of fine precise cutting and elegant garnishing, which require very sharp knives. Japanese knives are generally made of harder steel than European knives, so they are more brittle, but they can hold a sharper edge at a finer sharpening angle. They are also usually beveled only on one side, like a chisel.

I've been thinking one day of investing in a few Japanese knives, but first I wanted to work on some Japanese knife sharpening techniques and see if I could make the knives I already have sharper. I visited Manhattan's fantastic Japanese knife shop, Korin, in Tribeca to obtain a two-sided Japanese waterstone, 1000/6000 grit. This is much finer than my old oilstone, but it cuts cleanly and quickly. Japanese knife sharpeners usually work from the tip to the heel, always applying pressure on the forward stroke with the fingers on the section of the knife contacting the stone, building a burr all along the unbeveled edge, and then removing the burr and finishing the backside of the knife. I tried this approach, still always moving the knife in the direction of the blade, which meant switching hands to sharpen both sides of the knife. This is a bit awkward, but I've been getting better results than the way I'd been doing it before. Sometimes I can get a blade razor sharp this way--not just metaphorically, but really sharp enough to shave with--but not consistently. Sometimes razor sharp is too sharp, because the edge can chip when the knife is used for heavier tasks, but it's good to know how to make that kind of edge.

Today I met Mr. Ohe, from the Kikuichi knife company in Sakai, Japan, at a demonstration organized by The Brooklyn Kitchen. Representatives from Kukuichi discussed the history of the company and Japanese knife making, and Mr. Ohe demonstrated knife sharpening and hand engraving. A prizewinning sushi chef was on hand to demonstrate what these knives can do, and knives were available for sale at a discount with free engraving by Mr. Ohe, shown above.

What I found most interesting was that Mr. Ohe did not observe the principle I've always followed of always moving the knife on the stone in the direction of the edge. Here he is, forming the bevel by pushing the knife away from his body on a coarse waterstone, toward the spine of the knife rather than toward the cutting edge--
The best part of a workshop like this is that we could pass around the knife as he was building up the burr on the flat side and feel how pronounced it was--much more so than the burr that I was forming using my technique. The burr is difficult to show in a photograph, but you can feel it with your fingers--carefully to avoid being cut. When the burr formed all along the edge, he removed it and finished the back side of the knife--about one stroke on the flat side (which is actually slightly curved to keep food from sticking to the knife) for every nine strokes on the beveled side of a single beveled Japanese knife. He used a relatively small amount of water when forming the burr on the first side, and then a lot of water when finishing the back side. For Western style double-beveled knives, he recommended an equal number of strokes on each side. He did not switch hands, so on the first side he was pushing the knife away from the sharp edge, and on the second side he was pushing the knife toward the sharp edge, so that any feathering that would result from sharpening the first side would be cleaned up when sharpening the second side. To give the knife a polished edge, he followed this procedure first with a coarse stone if needed, then with a medium stone (1000 grit) and finally with a fine stone (5000 grit)--
Note that he always maintains the same 45-degree angle of the knife to the direction of travel of the stone (not the bevel angle, which should be around 22 degrees for Western knives and around 15-17 degrees for harder Japanese knives). I asked if this was appropriate for a European chef's knife, because the curve changes from the tip to the heel, and he said (through a translator) that he always worked with the blade at this same angle to sharpen the largest possible section of the blade at once.

I went home and soaked my waterstone and tried this technique with two knives that I'm never quite satisfied with--a Wusthof paring knife and a Sabatier boning knife. Maybe it is because they are small and flexible that they aren't as easy to sharpen as a thicker chef's knife, or maybe it's because I use the chef's knives more often, so I'm more practiced at sharpening them. Now those little knives are razor sharp. I think I've got a new sharpening technique.

I'll work with this a bit more, and then I'll sign up for a workshop at Korin, where I bought my waterstone. Then maybe I'll be ready for a Japanese knife.

UPDATE: I've written a follow-up to this post in the next blog entry.

UPDATE: After doing this for some time, I've come to the conclusion that with a European knife that has a bolster, it is necessary to adjust the angle of the blade with respect to the direction of travel, otherwise there will always be a section on one side of the knife that is unsharpened, and looking at other videos of Japanese style sharpening, it does seem that people who know what they are doing don't always maintain the 45-degree angle, particularly if the blade is curved.

Dad's Knife

Father of Food (that would be my dad) has pretty good knife skills, which I suppose he learned from his mother and improved a bit in a Chinese cooking class he took some 38 years ago, around the time he bought this Henckels 8-inch chef's knife from The Pampered Chef in Miami. We replaced this old, worn knife with a new Henckels 8-inch chef's knife on his birthday several years ago, but on our recent trip to Las Vegas, I found the old one in a drawer, and as you can see from the photo on top, it had been oversharpened so that a hollow had formed in front of the bolster, which is the thick part of a forged knife where the blade meets the handle. Periodically the bolster needs to be ground down to prevent this, but sometimes even professional sharpening services don't do this. The wooden handle has held up surprisingly well without splitting or cracking. I remember Grandmother of Food used to use ancient butcher's knives that probably belonged to her mother and had rubber bands to keep the handles from falling off. I grew up with this knife, and when I went to college some twenty-odd years ago and needed a knife of my own, I bought one just like it in the Henckels Four-star line with a molded polypropylene handle, which I still use every day.

I've been working on refining my sharpening technique and trying a few more advanced projects like grinding bolsters and reshaping worn out knives, so I thought I had nothing to lose by taking this knife back to New York with me and seeing if I could turn it into something usable again. I've reshaped a few old Sabatier carbon steel chef's knives successfully, but they are fairly easy to work. They are thinner than German style knives, so there isn't as much metal to remove, and carbon steel is easier to sharpen than stainless steel like Henckels "Friodur." It turned into a two-day project, and I still consider it a work in progress.

I started by grinding off most of the excess metal at the heel of the blade with a Dremel, cooling the blade in water as I progressed to avoid losing the temper of the steel. When it started looking like a knife again, I switched to a file, refining the curve to get back the characteristic bounce of a good chef's knife, and restoring the bevel along the edge. Then I continued sharpening and refining the edge first on a double-sided coarse/medium oilstone, and finished on a Japanese 1000/6000 grit waterstone. I tried chopping a bit and wasn't getting a good rock. The heel of the knife was striking the board too soon, so it was back to the file, and then another round of sharpening on both double-sided stones, and the result is what you see in the bottom photograph. The profile is narrower like a French-style chef's knife, but it's still got most of the heft of a German-style knife.

I used it to chop some carrots and garlic for dinner, and it felt like meeting an old friend I hadn't seen in a long time. It's not perfect yet, but it's not too bad for a knife that's pushing forty. I think I've got one more curve adjustment to get the rocking motion just right and a couple of more sharpenings to go to get the edge sharp all the way back to the heel of the knife, but except for the last inch or so, the blade is sharper than its been in years. If it turns out that the back part of the blade is too thick to hold an edge, I can still use it for heavy work like chopping through bones. When the edge is right, I'll probably shave a bit off the end of the handle to move the balance forward a bit, and then maybe I'll buff out the scratches on the blade.

Dad's old knife won't replace my newer knives that are in better shape, but my new knives won't take the place of this old friend either.