Some of my older readers might recognize the knife.
It has been in use in the kitchen for ages now and it is of course kinda weird. So I thought I would share the story first with you.
In 'em days in the Bethaus smithy I forged it from junk spring steel I found near the roadside when mountainbike riding to the trailhead. Long story short, I forged it, annealed it, and when it came to quenching, the lard bosh was nowhere to be found. Volker simply had disposed of it.
He had some delicious chicken soup in the larder of the Restaurant, though, so I used the steel to heat it up and the soup to quench the steel. I have never had to actually sharpen it, although it has seen at least ten years of hard kitchen work and cut a lot of hard sausage and bacon, nuts and what have you.
So I looked it up why this mad prank did work.
It finally turned out that the fat on top of the soup was solid and served the purpose of a first quench. The salt in the soup created sort of a bainite temper. Of course I just hardened the edge up to two thirds of the blade, with two different zones of hardness. Of course I was being a bit over the top and it was sort of a mad prank, but it turned out surprisingly well.
