The godfather and the knife

WEEK 26

Just as there are dog people and cat people in this world (I’m dog, without question), there are those who eat to live, and the rest of us who live to eat.

Most people in my life exist at the live-to-eat end of the spectrum. We plan dinner during lunch. Shop for ingredients with joy. And form friendships around cooking and eating.

One of those friends, Mark, I’ll call our Godfather of food, completely self-taught and deep in regional cuisine (like his favorite Galicia in northwestern Spain), but even more accomplished in technique. Although we have friends who’ve honed their craft in a thing or two – pasta, ramen broth, wine, coffee beans, French sauces, cookies, for example, as well as our own household’s artisan forays with Irena’s mastery of bespoke sausages and, more recently, fresh tonic syrup – Mark’s breadth of expertise is stunning. He was making 75-degree Celsius duck eggs years before consumer sous-vide contraptions showed up under Christmas trees. He’s as comfortable searing a steak in a cast-iron pan as he is baking bread from scratch. Then there’s everything from slow-cooking meat overnight in a smoker (pro-move: put the duck on the top rack so the fat from the duck drips on all below), to using liquid nitrogen at home to make exploding olives a-la molecular chef Ferran Adria, to cooking paella on a portable induction burner on a sidewalk in San Francisco (yes, that happened, for a work lunch party).

This week, Mark spent a few days with us in New York, and naturally, food was at the center of all things. Although my self-imposed 52×52 project guidelines prohibit new restaurants from making the cut for my new-thing-of-the-week, we did in fact eat nearly the entire menu at a recently opened Nikkei cuisine spot in the West Village (Nikkei merges traditional Peruvian ingredients with Japanese techniques), and we ventured to Harlem to Reverence, owned by Mark’s very good friend, chef Russell Jackson, who asked him to be Godfather to Russell’s seven-month-old boy – thus a nickname was born. Our supposed “night off from eating” turned into a Spanish-themed dinner party at home, with tuna-stuffed piquillo peppers, five-hour sous-vide octopus and pan-seared secreto, a special cut of Iberico pork.

The knife enters the story on Mark’s last morning with us.

At this point in the 72-hour arc of his visit, I am delirious, but determined to achieve my new thing for the week. So, just before he leaves for the airport, I insist on a knife sharpening tutorial. I’ve never once sharpened a knife, and can’t possibly pass up such perfect conditions. Not only do we have a master knife handler in the house, but we also have the king of knives in our rack – a gorgeous carbon steel Bob Kramer chef’s knife that Mark gifted us many years ago.

Mark sharpens using a Japanese style and has taken a few courses himself. We’ll call my session a pre-briefing, version 0.1, that introduced key parts of the process, instruments, vocabulary and basic technique. It’s now up to me to keep practicing.

We start by soaking the Messermeister whetstone he gave us on his last visit. It’s important to soak for about 5-10 minutes to remove air bubbles from inside the whetstone. The 2000-grit side is our starting point, to help get a good edge angle. Later, the 5000-grit side makes the edge even sharper and provides the finishing polish.

He pinches the knife blade near the handle, and, importantly, maintains the very same angle as he pushes the point of the knife slowly away with his fingers in an even stroke as it crosses the whetstone, and then pulls it back.

He repeats this rhythm for several strokes, and then moves across to where he hasn’t yet sharpened. Flip the knife over and repeat. Periodically we re-soak the stone to form a little slurry, so that the particles in the stone create a more abrasive surface to help sharpen.

As a last step, I learn how to correctly use the honing steel to help align the knife blade. This, as well, is all about finding and maintaining the correct angle. Interestingly, Mark holds the steel point-down with his left hand and has the knife in his right hand. With the back of the blade touching the steel, he pulls the knife back towards him and down the steel, holding that perfect angle.

How do we test our work? We take a page from a glossy magazine, fold it in half with a soft, rolled edge, hold it in the air and slice off a piece lengthwise.

Sadly, it’s time for Mark to call his Lyft to the airport. In his honor, I spend the next hour – with several YouTube video intermissions – attempting to sharpen the rest of our knives. I’d give myself a generous C+. I love that there is mastery and seriousness and perfection in this process, and much, much more for me to learn.