An Edge in the Kitchen

Here’s a quick Technique of the Week to get us started. You often read that you should sharpen your knife to 20° or 15° or some other seemingly arbitrary number. If you have a standard European-style (German, French or something along those lines) chef’s knife, it probably has edge angles of 20-25° per side. A western-style Japanese chef’s knife (Shun, Mac, Global, et at) will have edge angles about 15-16° per side. The trick is being able to find and repeat those angles. That’s where the Magic Angle Finder comes in. I won’t go into the math, but you can divide the height of the blade (at the heel) by a specific number to find out how high to raise the spine above the sharpening stone for a given angle. It sounds more complicated than it really is. Here’s how it works:

Chad’s Magic Angle Finder

For 20° divide by 3
For 15° divide by 4
For 12° divide by 5
For 10° divide by 6
For 8° divide by 7

So, if your chef’s knife is 1.5 inches tall, measured from spine to edge, and you want to put a 20° edge on it, just divide 1.5 by 3 to get .5 inches. Lay the knife flat on the stone and then raise the spine .5 inches. You have just set the edge angle at 20°. It works in metric, too. If you want to put a racy 12° edge angle on your Japanese gyuto and it is 45mm wide at the heel, just divide 45 by 5 to get 9. Raise the spine to 9mm above the stone and you are good to go. It can be a little tedious to sit there with a ruler, checking to make sure you’re at the right height but the payoff in consistency is well worth it. It also helps ingrain the angles into muscle memory so that the next time is much easier.

Coin Tricks

If that is too nerdy for you, you can just use a stack of quarters. A US quarter coin is officially .069 inches thick, though they vary slightly. Four quarters is a little more than .25″, five quarters is about .33″, six quarters is about .4″, 7 quarters is just under .5″ and eight quarters is just over .5″. It takes a surprising 15 quarters to reach a full inch high.

To raise the spine of your chef’s knife .5″, use 7 quarters. It’s not quite .5″ but the width of the spine makes up the difference and puts the spine at almost exactly the right height.

Can you say, “low budget”?

Things are still perking along behind the scenes here at Edge in the Kitchen world headquarters. I’m told that the printing gnomes have nearly finished their jobs. The finished books should be coming off the presses today, well ahead of the June 10 on-sale date. I’m certain there will be Harry Potter-like midnight sharpening & garnishing parties at bookstores worldwide as the eager masses count down the minutes until the store can officially sell the book.</p> <p style=”>There are big plans for the website, including a redesign to feature some of Bryan Reagan’s great photography from the book. Here’s what’s coming in the next few weeks:

• Technique of the Week: Each week will feature a new technique or skill — from chiffonade to sharpening — fully illustrated with step-by-step photographs and detailed instructions. You’ll be a julienning genius in no time.
• Blade Show Roundup: I’ll be in Atlanta at the world’s largest cutlery expo May 30 through June 1. Some of the best custom kitchen knife makers in the world will be there, including Murray Carter, Shosui Takeda and Shinichi Watanabe. I’ll bring home photos, interviews and reports from the show on the latest in kitchen cutlery.
• My Knives: I’m frequently asked what knives I use in the kitchen. I’ve owned nearly every chef’s knife in existence and have settled on a select collection that ranges from the exotic to the pedestrian. I’ll give you the guided tour.
• Video! I’m working on a series of brief knife skills videos for the site. You’ll be enthralled by their low-budget charm.

A cook should be aware of his or her own habits and style because knives always adjust as they are used by a particular person. They adapt to that person. Masaharu Morimoto, from An Edge in the Kitchen.

Photo: Michael Temchine for The New York Times

Today’s New York Times has an in-depth look at high end fruit and vegetable carving, Knife Skills: Creating Feasts for the Eyes. The accompanying photos are gorgeous, though the writer misses an important historical point. Food sculpture goes a lot farther back than 1977. Elaborately carved centerpieces were a mainstay of medieval and Renaissance tables. Either way, the knife skills involved are simply amazing.

Food Borne Illnesses

Background

There are thousands of viruses and pathogens and millions of bacteria swarming in, on and around us at all times. E. Coli, as a matter of fact, is a natural and necessary inhabitant of the intestines of nearly all animals, including people. Don’t want to deal with it? Get yourself a big plastic bubble and a sleeping bag. Otherwise, just accept the fact that we’re surrounded by bacteria, most of which we will never need to worry about, and get on with your life.

The Bad News

The bad bugs are out there. You’ve probably already run into them. There’s no such thing as a “24 hour stomach flu,” so that long night you spent endlessly counting your bathroom floor tiles was probably food poisoning of one sort or another. The Centers for Disease Control estimate that there are between 76 and 81 million cases of food poisoning each year, the vast majority of which go unreported because they didn’t require a trip to the hospital or doctor’s office.

Food borne illnesses kill between 5,000 and 9,000 people each year, mostly the very young, the very old and those with compromised immune systems. If you are cooking for someone who falls into this category, you need to take extra precautions to prevent cross contamination in your kitchen. Most people suffer mild to severe diarrhea, fever, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain and get well on their own in about a week. About 325,000 cases are serious enough to require hospitalization.

And the Really Bad News . . .

Somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of food poisoning incidents can be traced to food prepared and eaten at home.

Wash Your Hands

Common kitchen pathogens include Salmonella, Campylobacter jejuni and the ever popular E. Coli, along with a whole host of other bacteria, viruses, molds, fungi and parasites. While E. Coli O157:H7 gets a lot of press, campylobacter is by far the most common source of food poisoning.

Today’s factory farmed chickens, tasty as they might be, are inbred mutants with more recessive genes than the royal family.

Hand washing is the best preventative. Eighty percent of all pathogens are spread through hand contact. Every 60 seconds a working adult touches as many as 30 objects. The number of people who say they don’t wash their hands or cutting boards after cutting raw meat or chicken has dropped to 15 percent in recent years. Those are the mouth-breathers who admit it. Videotaped studies of kitchen habits show that the real number is about 30 percent. That is just scary. Knowing how to minimize cross contamination is vital. Hands, sinks, sponges and cutting boards are prime bacteria delivery systems. Sinks and sponges are the worst offenders. Cutting boards, because they come in contact with a variety of foods during a single meal preparation, have got to be kept clean to avoid transferring pathogens from one food item to the next. That’s why you need one board that is just for meats, fish and poultry. A recent report found that 80 percent of all grocery store chickens in the U.S. are contaminated with Salmonella, Campylobacter or both. You don’t want that in your salad or on your strawberry shortcake.

“But,” you say, “my grandmother/mother/aunt used the same cutting board forever and never gave it anything more than a quick wipedown. We never got sick.” Maybe. Times are different now. Your grandmother’s fish and chicken came from a neighbor or the next county over. Even grocery stores were stocked with relatively local ingredients farmed on a moderate scale. Today’s factory farmed chickens, tasty as they might be, are inbred mutants with more recessive genes than the royal family. Your leafy greens were picked under conditions that in no way resemble those in your grandmother’s garden. Wash your hands. And your cutting board.

Raleigh food blogger, attorney, and man about town Dean McCord has written a very kind preview of “An Edge in the Kitchen” titled These are the Days of Our Knives on his blog, VarmintBites. Dean writes about dining, home cooking, family, and the Triangle’s burgeoning food movement. His cobbler recipe is also top notch. Definitely go read his preview of my book, but bookmark the site. It’s good reading.

The first review is in. The good folks at OnlyKnives.com have just posted a glowing review of An Edge in the Kitchen:

If you’ve spent any time at all researching kitchen knives, you quickly realize that there’s a lot of disinformation out there. Myths, misperceptions and outright lies abound. Chad attempts to debunk some of these myths and give you an unbiased, straight scoop on knives. . . .

Overall, the book is a great read. Chad’s got a breezy writing style and a sharp sense of humor. I doubt we’ll see a sequel or that they’ll turn it into a movie, but it’s quite entertaining nonetheless.

If you want to learn about knives, as any serious cook really should, I can recommend no better way than to check out this book. <click to see the whole review>

The only thing I object to is the dismissal of the movie idea. I often spend hours wondering who is going to play me on the big screen.

I’ve updated the News & Reviews page. In short, I’ll be at the Blade Show in Atlanta May 30 through June 1 and the East Coast Kitchen Knife Gathering June 20 - 22 in Pennsylvania. See the page for details. Hope to see you at one of the events!

Part 2 of So You Wanna Buy a Knife is up at Leite’s Culinaria. Todays lesson: How Not to Buy Garbage

Sometimes it can be a little hard to tell quality knives from knives that simply have better marketing budgets. Here are the warning signs that the knives you are looking at might be not be all that they seem: