Sharp edges cutting things

March 7, 2020 2:57 AM

Here are some calming, nearly trance-like .gifs and short clips of things that are being cut by very sharp knives:
- Soap slicing
- Sushi
- Leaf cutting
- Carving out the bowl of a wooden spoon
- Steak
- Slow-motion video of an apple and some bananas being sliced in half while in mid air
- Japanese knife professional transforms vegetables into works of art
- From a Japanese Kezuroukai Planing Competition with shavings as thin as 5 micron, plus (Video)

Ploughing

Of course there's a lot of vegetable cutting: Onions, shallots, parsley, Tomato, cucumber and more cucumber art

A chisel trimming the top off some edge banding

A paper cutting guillotine trimming textbooks

A drawknife being used to make the backing staves of a barrel

Meat

Swordfish cutting

A bartender shaping a chunk of ice into a diamond

Scythin' Away

Much more on the r/sharpcutting subreddit

posted by growabrain (29 comments total)

Yesssss
posted by Literaryhero at 3:18 AM on March 7, 2020

...I need to sharpen my knives.
posted by Mizu at 3:43 AM on March 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

[cw, hope you're comfortable with me getting hurt]

Way ahead of you, Mizu... I recently decided I need to learn how to sharpen my knife properly.

A day or so later, while cutting a poblano pepper, I cut a very neat 4mm thick slice off the tip of my left index finger, diagonally and right though the nail. I no longer think knives need to be as sharp as humanly possible.

side note, did you know a finger will heal up *excatly* like it was, as long as you don't cut the nail bed?
posted by kleinsteradikaleminderheit at 4:10 AM on March 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

What even is happening in that leaf cutting video?
posted by jacquilynne at 4:24 AM on March 7, 2020

Hmm. What can you tell me about the 'steak'?
posted by StephenB at 4:56 AM on March 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

The cucumber art one is insane, maybe it is sped up but I couldn't even do that at 1/10th the speed.
posted by epo at 5:29 AM on March 7, 2020

Surprised they let Ed Kemper work in the prison kitchen
posted by thelonius at 6:07 AM on March 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

growabrain: "- Steak"

Steak news!
posted by chavenet at 6:28 AM on March 7, 2020

They say he carved it himself...from a bigger spoon.
posted by hydrophonic at 6:51 AM on March 7, 2020 [4 favorites]

As the one who does the knife sharpening and cutting/slicing/chopping duties in the kitchen, this is relevant to my interests. That cucumber carving is something else again, though. Wow.
posted by coppertop at 7:40 AM on March 7, 2020

A related tangent: kiwami japan - interesting youtube channel by a funny and multitalented vlogger who crafts knives out of everything imaginable
posted by gemutlichkeit at 8:21 AM on March 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

I like this tutorial on knife sharpening: Sharpening Fundamentals by Murray Carter. He's a bit goofy, but un-fussy and keeps things simple but effective.
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 8:38 AM on March 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

We just got a proper sushi knife after years of mangling sashimi with my (actually quite sharp!) general purpose chef's knife and the first time I sliced into some raw salmon with the sushi knife I said "whoooa" like I was channeling Keanu. It is WILD how sharp sushi knives are.
posted by potrzebie at 8:46 AM on March 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

There's so much good content on Reddit. Don't let the assh*les out there keep you away. Cool post, thanks.
posted by SoberHighland at 8:52 AM on March 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

I couldn't watch the soap link. Weirdly, I was identifying with the soap.

Fortunately, I could enjoy the cucumber links. Totally amazing. I didn't know it was possible for a knife to be that sharp.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 9:49 AM on March 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

I absolutely love the paper guillotine. The smooth perfection of the cut stack of paper makes me feel things.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 9:55 AM on March 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

I learned about "scary sharp" many years ago and promptly scary sharped all of the blades in my house. Except butter knives.

The end result was that I couldn't let anyone near my knives and tools. Accidental cuts and iffy handling meant cuts to the bone, finger tips coming off, etc. I nicked the corner off of my pinky doing a paper art project. The end result is that I no longer fetishize sharp knives and prefer to stay away from them. A classic example of getting what one wishes for.

Of the videos I'd say that the apple, spoon carving, and planing were "scary sharp". Mainly because wooden cooking boards and plastic buckets do not survive contact with REALLY sharp knives. Otherwise, great, satisfying cutting videos!
posted by pdoege at 10:19 AM on March 7, 2020 [3 favorites]

The steak is a lie.
posted by mhoye at 10:52 AM on March 7, 2020 [5 favorites]

For most household tasks super super sharp is just a waste of time and tool steel, as the finely honed edge won't hold that long anyway. Say, 4000 grit or so is fine for the final polish for general use kitchen knives. Some of this showy sharpening is just healthy niche geekery. But certain tasks really need an edge as sharp as possible. For some reason most folks seem to have gone over to water stones, but I'm still happy with my oil stones. A water cooled grinding wheel helps when a fresh bevel needs to be established though.
posted by St. Oops at 10:55 AM on March 7, 2020

(Virtually all professional kitchens don’t spend time fetishizing their tools like this and use $15 plastic-handled chef’s knives from cooking supply stores.)
posted by mhoye at 11:16 AM on March 7, 2020 [5 favorites]

Twenty years ago I bought an expensive ceramic chef's knife. At the time, I had a roommate who was an executive chef and he took the knife to work. He told people to be careful with it, but one guy almost immediately cut himself badly enough to go to the ER.

I think sharp things are very cool. I have a very complete Lansky sharpening set and I also have a 60-piece set of precision blades. I never, ever cut towards myself.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 11:31 AM on March 7, 2020

I keep my kitchen knives somewhere between St. Oops' level and "stunt/scary sharp" - sharp enough to be a joy to use in my everyday kitchen tasks at least (the process isn't that tricky or magical, the hardest part is learning to keep a steady angle). As a result, I'm often frustrated when I use anyone else's knives...I recently took a cooking class, and while the knives provided weren't dull they weren't terribly sharp either. Sectioning a navel orange with a massive and not-quite-sharp 9" chef knife can't be done easily or deftly, that's for sure.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:01 PM on March 7, 2020

I was a professional chef for about 10 years in the 70's - 80's, and had a set of German Zwillinger knives. When I moved to the States in 1984, I brought them with me and continued to use them. Last year, when I moved back to Denmark, I sold the last of the pieces for a couple of bucks each.
posted by growabrain at 2:02 PM on March 7, 2020

Okay, so not scary sharp, but still able to cut through sheet steel with no apparent effort: Steel Slitting.

In the surprisingly peaceful silent video, you'll see a slitting line use form rolls to shear through steel coil. The form rolls themselves aren't remotely sharp, but the way the machine is set up makes them roll an amazing cut into steel. If you're wondering what the huge pit in the middle of the line's for, it's to allow for thickness variation across the coil to take up slack — once a coil is slit, each part can be quite different lengths.

To see this in real life is deafening, and the speed that the steel moves at is very scary.
posted by scruss at 2:37 PM on March 7, 2020

Carefully done Obsidian razor shave demo (lathering starts ~4:00) using a custom flintknapped blade (not for sale) made by Mike Cook at Art of Ishi. Video is SFW – there’s no bloodshed – but one’s nose could be in careless hands.
posted by cenoxo at 2:43 PM on March 7, 2020

I'm pretty sure the link labeled "parsley" is actually cilantro.
posted by Dip Flash at 3:25 PM on March 7, 2020

Whichever it is, there's certainly a surprising amount of it. Processing that much by hand in something like 2 minutes is an impressive feat!
posted by Greg_Ace at 4:28 PM on March 7, 2020

Relevant spoon carving: Fushimi Urushi Kobo.
posted by Dr. Send at 8:27 PM on March 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

More spoon carving, this time with hand adze and bent knives. Carving a big spoon.
posted by Mei's lost sandal at 8:35 AM on March 8, 2020