Knife Skills Movie Nominated for Oscar Award

Knife Skills is a documentary about an upscale restaurant staffed by people fresh out of prison with zero culinary experience. It’s not a knife movie like the ones BLADE normally covers, but blades do play an important role. 

On the knife front, the larger point to be made is about the intentions behind the use of a knife. Here is a group of people with serious criminal records. In another context, that could be dicey, but here it isn’t. It takes the air out of arguments for regulating knives according to specs.

Knife Skills also shows how knives can create collaborative spaces for the sake of art, business or leisure. Can a restaurant function without knives? Why do the best chefs on Earth also seek the best knives? You can’t separate food and people so long as there is a tool with a cutting edge, and that means knives. The relationship is so essential that even convicts can be trusted to preserve it.

The documentary caught the attention of more than just BLADE, too. It received a 2018 Oscar nomination. We’ll see if a knife movie brings home the big award on March 4, when the awards ceremony takes place.

Knife Skills didn’t hit theaters in a wide release, but you can stream it on Amazon Prime for a couple bucks.

Heads up: The trailer above contains some coarse language. 

Happy 30th Birthday, Outdoor Edge

Denver-based Outdoor Edge turned 30 years old last month, which means it’s still clinging to the spirit of its 20s but contemplating middle age while holding down a mortgage and a couple kids. (In lieu of a birthday card, BLADE respectfully submits that joke.)

Outdoor Edge won a BLADE Magazine Knife Of The Year® in its debut year at the 1988 BLADE Show in Knoxville, Tennessee, with the Game Skinner. As BLADE‘s Steve Shackleford points out, that went on to be one of the most knocked off knives ever. No good deed goes unpunished, I guess.

Less copied is the way Outdoor Edge got its start, simply because it’s so challenging to build a knife company from the ground up. From its news release:

From its humble beginnings as a one-man show with four prototype samples, [David] Bloch’s company, Outdoor Edge, has grown significantly in the past thirty years. Currently, the company has 24 employees and offers more than 120 products. Originally based in Boulder, Colorado, the company moved to a larger facility in Denver in 2010.

BLADE wishes Outdoors Edge 30 more great years of success! 

New York Times: Knives Make Excellent Gifts

For being based on an island that prosecutes electricians for carrying pocketknives on the job, this is a refreshing change of pace for the Gray Lady. A NYT article about gift registries favors knives and knife accessories as foolproof (and inexpensive) options.

Who can blame them? If you have a kitchen, you’ll use a knife. Heck, even if you don’t have a kitchen, you’ll probably use a knife at some point. 

From the article:

Choose a few high-quality knives instead of a knife block set, as sets tend to have a lot of filler knives that you don’t need. Wirecutter suggests three different knives for the average cook: chef’s knife, paring knife and serrated knife.

Throw in a cutting board while you’re at it, too.

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