Blacksmithing : Making a BBQ Carving Set

Actually it came from when we were doing the TV pilot, four years ago I think, I knocked up a two-pronged dining fork, old sort of Medieval style dining fork, for the feast that we had. And I think those kind of sat glaring at me for a couple of years thinking, you know, what can we do with that to turn it into a viable product, something we can put onto the website. And then Joe and I were doing the cutlery set, the camping cutlery set, last Christmas. We had the knife, the fork and the spoon in a canvas roll. Then we've just did, I think it just got bigger, just got bigger and bigger. There's no other way to explain it really. We just wanted something bigger. So it is literally a kind of scaled-up version of the table knife and fork, the cutlery set that we were doing. And it kind of fused with the barbecue set. So we do the barbecue fork and the tongs and the spatulas and all that stuff. And it was kind of a fusion. It sits somewhere, weirdly enough, kind of between the table and the barbecue. Something you can use for cooking with. So the fork's great, it's fantastic for turning meat. And then you can kind of bring the whole lot to the table and then you can use the knife and fork as a carving set. And it was just a really nice kind of marriage of the two. Any fork is pretty difficult to make because you need to get the tines really, really nice and even. So, you know, basically once you've forged out, you do your initial heat, your initial forging and then we split down the middle. And you've got to get that split really, really even. We actually cut it with a disc cutter. Traditionally they're cut with a hot cut. The dangers, not quite the right word, but the kind of difficulties are the same. If you're cutting with a hot cutter or with a disc, you have to get it really, really nice and straight. You've got to get equal material on each side. If you don't get equal material, you get one really long tine and one really short one, or one thin one and one fat one, or they're off-center. So, you know, overall it's a relatively easy piece of forging. But it's very difficult to get them exactly right. To get them looking really, really nice and clean. I've never forged with three tine forks, to be honest. They're much more difficult. So, partly we forge two because they're a little bit easier, but also I love that kind of medieval look to it. This one being a carving fork, you know, you've got to have a certain amount of length and a certain amount of, sort of, sturdiness, a certain amount of strength in the tines. If you can imagine you're going into a big joint, you've got to be able to, or a chicken, you've got to be able to kind of hold it down. It's no good if it's too long or if it's too short. So, the proportions of these are very important to get right. One of the kind of challenges, to a certain degree, is that we make the forks out of stainless steel. Now, it's not necessarily more difficult to forge than normal steel, but it is a different type of material, so you need to have a slightly different mindset when you're approaching it. It does forge differently, especially when you're forging out the tines and when you're cutting, splitting things, you definitely have to kind of remember what material you're working with. So, forged stainless, we get that lovely black finish, but because it's an eating tool, it doesn't go rusty. We don't want it to go rusty, anyway. Actually, the interesting thing about these forks, and what I really, really love about them, is the final shape, that beautiful U-shape, that slightly tapered U with the neck, and where it joins, where the tines join the neck and handle with the fork itself, that shape is actually caused by forging in behind where that U-shape is. If you don't do that, you get this very clumpy, kind of rigid shape, and especially forging out on the power hammer, you can get in just in behind where the tines are, and it actually flares them out, and that's how you get that really, really nice, beautiful shape. The original fork came out of, weirdly enough, reading a book by a writer called B. Wilson, which is called Consider the Fork, and B. Wilson writes this book all about cutlery, and the history of cutlery, and I found this book a couple of years ago, and it absolutely fascinates me, the history and the evolution of cutlery, and we're so used nowadays to having a fork with any meal, but actually, traditionally, you wouldn't have had forks. You would have had a chunk of bread, well, originally, you just would have eaten with your hands, and then you moved to having a trencher, which is like a bread plate, which you would have used, and I'm not quite sure whether they would eat the plates, or whether it was just baked, and you'd eat off it. You'd always take a knife with you to dinner, which is classic. If you turn up for dinner nowadays with a knife, your host would probably ask you to leave it at the door. So certainly in medieval times, you would have gone to dinner, you would have had a hunting knife that probably would have acted as an eating knife as well, and you would have used your hand with a chunk of bread. And I think from what I've read, and from what I've kind of looked into during the Renaissance in Italy, and I think in Florence, but I might not be 100% correct, that they stopped people bringing knives to dinner, mostly because you've got this fantastic combination of, generally, men, knives, and alcohol. And you throw a lot of meat in there, and you're going to end up with a fight, basically. I'm afraid there's not too many ways to look at it. And I think there was a general consensus that in the Renaissance things should be a little bit more refined. So they stopped people bringing knives, and then you would have had a knife laid for you at the table. And that's how the blunt-ended knife was developed. So you had these rounded-off knives to stop you stabbing your neighbour. And I think you would have had maybe a single spike, but definitely a two-pronged fork was the initial thing that came with your knife. So that's where the birth of the knife and the fork. I suppose going back a bit, you would have had wooden spoons. So you probably would have had a spoon and a knife. And this is all kind of development of the cutlery. And I just thought this was a fantastic idea to recreate that. Food of the past was mostly, especially in the West, was root vegetables, and meat, and bread. In fact, all the things that we love. And cheese. Lots of cheese. None of which matters. You basically stab the food, and you eat it. You can eat it with your hands. It's only more recently, more refined foods, and through the French traditions of dining, fine dining, that you've got three prongs, and then now modern, more like four prongs. But being blacksmiths, we had this idea for a big feast. What do you want with a feast? You want something that's feast-like. Something that fits in with a feast style. The programme we were making wasn't about fine dining. So we all had these forks. And it just kind of went from there. Then I thought, well, let's make some knives. But making a traditional knife with a wooden handle, and bolsters, and ground blades, and all this kind of thing, they're expensive. So they take a lot of time to make. And they are expensive to produce. And they look beautiful. But the concept of the single piece stake knife was born. And it is just a single piece of high carbon steel, forged out, metal blade, metal handle, simplicity in itself. But in a previous film, we've shown how the sort of Scandinavian style blacksmith's knife is made. And these are pretty much the same techniques. But it's a kind of maybe a more refined type of knife, much easier for eating with. And the original set, like I said, we produced this camping set, sort of gift set, like a knife, fork, and spoon, and a canvas roll that you would have chucked in your backpack. And you can take it out anywhere, if you're out camping or whatever. And that concept just sort of evolved into the carving set, like a matching set for the cutlery. It's more of a purposeful knife, as opposed to the traditional blacksmith's knife, which is a bit more of a kind of, it'll do pretty much anything. That's very much got a specific purpose. Yeah, I think this is a single purpose knife. It's definitely an eating tool. It's an eating knife. The traditional blacksmith's knives could have been used for eating, but they are also used for cutting string, and fruit, and whatever, and cutting pigeons, and all sorts. All of which you could do with one of these, but this is just a sort of a more refined version. And it's quite nice. If you're laying a table setting, and you're doing a lot of fire cooking, it's quite nice in the sense that the sort of theme flows all the way through. So it is just a sort of, it's a slightly scaled up, and a larger version of the cutlery. And the full steel carving knife is lovely to use. It's really simple. You don't really worry about forgetting meat juice on it. It's easy to clean. We're aiming for an underground blade, so the whole thing has forged texture on it. And we're forging the bevels right, right down to almost a cutting edge. Not quite, obviously you've got to grind the edge, but they're forged right out. So all we have to do is put a very, very small, it's probably about 3 quarters of a millimetre secondary grind, after it's been hardened and tempered, you put a very fine secondary bevel on it, and it gives this lovely kind of completely forged feel and look to it. So it is quite different from how we would make other blades, where we forge it out and leave a little bit of thickness along the edge, and then you grind in the bevels. And I think it looks gorgeous. It gives a really, really nice kind of rustic sort of, in inverted commas, medieval look, but would sit quite nicely in a modern restaurant. Cabrito is a company that's founded on the idea of, the dairy system in the UK has 100,000 milking nannies, they probably have around 60,000 to 70,000 male kids a year born, and up until we came along, in the overwhelming majority of cases, those animals were euthanised. And me and my partner Sushi, who set the business up together, just thought that was indefensible, morally, ethically indefensible. And also a tremendous waste of what is meat that is popular all over the world. The rest of the world knows goat meat is delicious, it's only the UK that really sticks out like a sore thumb. So we thought we could, we had a sort of, a reasonable restaurant trade in the UK, we thought maybe we could take Goat-tober, and we could maybe do an event, and then maybe get some people to put some goat on the menu and tweet about it a little bit, and it kind of took off. So Goat-tober is not my idea, it started in the United States 10 years ago this year by a woman called Erin Fairbanks, and she was working for a company called Heritage Foods. Heritage Foods are like the last bastion of well-reared, well-looked-after, ethical meat in the whole of the United States, more or less. And they work with farmers across the US, particularly in the Midwest, they've got quite a famous turkey farmer called Frank Rees, who's the only person left producing naturally-reared turkeys in the whole of the United States. So that gives you an idea of what they're like, they're an ethical, free-range, non-antibiotic meat seller, and they're based in Brooklyn. And Heritage Foods is run by Patrick Martins, his wife, Anne Saxelby, runs the best cheese shop in all of New York. So she was working with these cheese producers up in the northern states of the US, through Wisconsin, and around Maine, and Vermont, where a lot of that sort of farmhouse cheeses are made. And Anne Saxelby came across this problem with the billy goats, that if you have a herd that is producing liquid milk, goat dairy, in the simplest terms, in order to produce lactation, you require pregnancy. Pregnancy has a very definite outcome, and most goats will have two kids, and nature decrees that it's 50-50 split between boys and girls. What happens to all those boys? And in conversations with the farmers, the farmers were saying, we really want to find a market for these, it's the worst part of our job having to destroy them. In any dairy system in the world, more or less, where there are male but dairy billies, nobody wants to eat them, so they're euthanized. So Erin had the idea of using her contacts through Brooklyn and Manhattan, through the Brooklyn and Manhattan restaurant world, to try and help out these farmers and sell their male goats. And that became Goattober. So, about five years ago, I got in contact with Erin and Heritage Foods, and said, would you mind if I stole your idea? Because I think, it kind of grabs the imagination, it's a really good idea, and it's a really silly name, it's a really easy way to convey, there is this problem in the UK dairy system, and it needs to be fixed, and this is a tool to help fix it. Yeah, we did our first event of the Jugged Hare four years ago, and now, well, this year obviously is very different, but last year we had events all over Europe, in Trinidad, in the United States, all over the United States, and in Australia, and it's something that people have picked up, because as I said, everywhere there is a dairy industry, there are billy goats that are going to get euthanized, because we don't have, in the West, in that sort of generic term, the West, we don't have any cultural history of eating goat, and we're teaming up with people like Alex to showcase their products while cooking them. It's difficult to have favourites, but this is definitely my favourite, and the thing about Alex's stuff is the heft of it, like it has a weight and a definition in the hand, that is just lovely. Married to that is the functional simplicity of it, it's really lovely things, and the reason that, I mean with the neck fillets, you just stick it in, pick it up and turn it, and not faffing around with tongs, it's just really nice. It's also really handy to stick in, and then use a knife to carve it, and I just thought, why haven't I always had one of these? Why has it taken me 43 years to own one of these? It just doesn't make any sense. And Alex said that we've got peas to blame for why we don't use these more often. I don't like peas more than I like my barbecue fork. Bring back the barbecue fork and ban peas. That's all I say. Curry goat is amazing, and it's one of the great world foods that is really famous, but there is much more to goat meat than curry, and one of the things that we hear is every time, oh what do you do for a living? I run a goat meat company, oh I love goat curry. It's almost like a reflex, like everybody's tried goat in this context, and what Goatober tries to do is say there's loads more to it, and part of the reason that there is loads more to it is because sheep farming is very, not specific to the UK, but it's very popular in the UK, so we don't have a lot of goat in our farming system, whereas if you go to places throughout the Middle East or North Africa or in South America, the word mutton is interchangeable between sheep and goat, so a lot of the recipes that we eat, like tagine is a good example, the feta that we cooked at the forge the other day, those have been anglicised in cookbooks and recipes to use lamb or to use mutton, because we haven't had the goat available to put them in to make them authentic, and that's basically what Goatober's doing, there is so much more to goat meat than this, than your instant, because it's almost like it's peas and carrots, curry goat, it's bread and butter, fish and chips, curry goat, and using the platform of Goatober and pulling in other people to celebrate it with us gives us an opportunity to say I'm going to do this feta with it, I'm going to do these meatballs with it, I'm going to do this or that with it, I never thought of using goat for that, and that's about showing people what it can do. Sometimes you can be a little bit too soapboxy, not aggressive, but just a little bit too forceful, a little bit too repetitive, and not say actually yes we want you to do this thing, but this thing is really nice, and it's not this thing isn't much more expensive than the things you're already doing, or you should feel guilty about the way you're behaving at the moment, none of that's in Goatober, Goatober is we just want you to eat some really nice food and try something you've never done before, and cooking is loads of fun, cooking is fun, it's enjoyable, it's something you get to share with your family and other people, hopefully you'll cook something for 4 or for 6 not for 7 at the moment unfortunately, and you'll be able to share it with other people and just the convivial nature of dining. One of the other things about the feta that I really like is that it shows how easy it is to cook goat, going back to people talking about curry, you think we need these long slow cooks, we need these really bold flavours, it's quite a complex recipe, and what that dish shows is you cook it like a steak, you slice it up and throw it in with other ingredients you're already quite familiar with, so it doesn't take hours of preparation, you don't have to know any special skills, if you can light a barbecue and cook a steak, you can make that dish, and one of the things, as I said, we've tried for years to tell people that goat doesn't have any special characteristics that make it difficult to cook, you can cook it just like lamb, you can cook it just like mutton, and the simplicity in that feta is one of the things we try to promote when we do these cooking videos. There's lots of those pulse, broken bread, salad-y, yoghurt-y dishes that come from Lebanese, Syrian, Israeli area, it's not an unusual mixture. You can do it with all kinds of meat as well, we used the neck fillets for the one we did, but you could quite easily slice grilled leg meat into it, you could even do it with some chops, just dice, just fry it off, and the reason I like those dishes so much is because it's like putting a bowl of nachos in front of somebody, everybody dives in, everybody has a little bit, and I also like the idea of piling a big plate of food in the middle and everybody sharing it, because those kind of ways of eating just stops and everybody, it breaks a lot of ice if you're giving a plate of food to share, but yeah, with that particular dish, I think a lot of these things, a lot of these dishes' designs are made from using stuff up, and essentially that's yesterday's food, that feta, because you've already cooked the chickpeas for the dinner you had the night before, you've got the pita bread left over from the night before, the meat, you could use, if you roasted a leg, you could put cold meat into that as well, almost like a Lebanese hash, I guess, reusing stuff from the time before, and then putting the yoghurt into it to give it a bit of sweetness and a little bit of moisture, and then, the other thing, the thing we didn't put in it was the Aleppo chili, put a bit of Aleppo chili through it, or you could put fermented chilies through it, and then loads of coriander for a load of lift, and also loads of lemon juice, so you get, the meat sort of makes it a warm salad, but with the addition of the herbs and the lemon juice and the yoghurt, it kind of lifts it beyond the sum of its parts. Alex and his team are quite local to us, so being able to support him is a good thing, because it's the same as supporting a local business, but I think it comes down, I keep returning to the heft of the product in the hand, and there's an authenticity to it that you just don't get with stuff that's smashed out on a laser cutter, and that, I think, it's a strange thing, but that, when you're preparing the whole, I cook a lot for a lot of people at home, I have people around all the time, and to be able to use these things as part of the sharing experience almost gives a sort of a depth and authenticity to the entire experience.