The best time of the year.

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This year we are blessed with friends from England and my in laws from San Diego. I managed to track down a Diestel turkey – you know, the kind that wanders California’s great wide expanses while listening to Mozart. This translates into a tasty and juicy bird.

And, in protest against our government’s woeful ways with our money and our citizenry’s placid, nay, complicit, acceptance of the rape of our economy, the wines this year are Spanish (a nice Rioja to start) and French (thank you Bordeaux!) Even the port is from where port should be from, meaning Portugal, US winemakers being clueless when it comes to making this grog.

On the hardware front I have finally invested in a genuine French Sabatier chef’s knife. It’s from Thiers, in France, and if you decide to get one be super careful as the name is not trade marked, meaning there are lots of nasty imitations out there. You will not find this one at WalMart. The one I got has a carbon steel (non-stainless) blade, meaning a little more care is called for when cleaning, but provides a far keener and longer lasting edge, something stainless steel cannot equal. I toyed with the idea of one of those Japanese ones where the metal has been folded on itself a billion times or something, like one of those Samurai swords, but found the look beyond ugly. Form cannot be forgotten even when function is superior.

I was rather taken with the ‘rosewood’ handle on this one, though it’s actually epoxy. Unlike Apple’s deceitful ads (twice as fast, twice as light, blah blah blah) this one makes no claim to anything other than a sharp edge. Heck, it will rust on you before you can say Vive la France if you don’t dry and oil it after use. Note the lovely design of the bolster, where the blade enters the handle. Unlike your camera, this will still be a current model in fifty or a hundred years’ time. And spare parts will remain available ….

Sharpening? Why trust the Village Idiot with missing digits to do this the old way? The answer is the right tool to confer the right angles of grind and a proper steeling, something your local ‘expert’ knife sharpener knows nothing of. I use one of these and immediately ran my new knife through it producing, yes you guessed it, a finer edge than the factory managed before shipping. Proof? How about two millimeter thick tomato slices, the skin intact? The ultimate test of a kitchen knife.

The ultimate test. Two millimeter thick tomato slices.

The Chef’s Choice 130 knife sharpener’s Stage 2 burnishing steel, removed for clarity.

After re-establishing the proper 25 degree edges on your trashed knives – using the Stage 1 coarse diamond wheel – you pass the blade over the Stage 2 burnishing steel a dozen times a side. Then one final quick swipe through the fine stropping wheel in Stage 3 and you are set. In each case, you torque the knife’s handle so that the blade is gently forced against the tool, something the instructions fail to point out. So twist CCW on the left and CW on the right. Thereafter a swipe across the Stage 2 steel every now and then is all that’s needed and the amount of material you will be removing will be one thousandth of that destroyed by the Village Idiot. And Stage 2 needs no mains power – it’s simply a stationery hard steel.

Well, I’m off to the kitchen where the bird awaits.

Diestel turkey with rosemary from the garden, ready for the oven.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Update September, 2020.

The chef’s knife gets little use nowadays, obsoleted by a cleaver – a superior tool in every way.