Any decent knife can be made sharp; its “edge geometry” is the key to how it will cut. Illustration by Jaime Hernandez

Bob Kramer is one of a hundred and twenty-two people in the world, and the only former chef, to have been certified in the United States as a Master Bladesmith. To earn that title, which is conferred by the American Bladesmith Society, Kramer underwent five years of study, culminating in the manufacture, through hand-forging, of six knives. One of those was a roughly finished, fifteen-inch bowie knife, which Kramer had to use to accomplish four tasks, in this order: cut through an inch-thick piece of Manila rope in a single swipe; chop through a two-by-four, twice; place the blade on his forearm and, with the belly of the blade that had done all the chopping, shave a swath of arm hair; and, finally, lock the knife in a vise and permanently bend it ninety degrees. The combination of these challenges tests steel’s two chief but conflicting capabilities: its flexibility and its hardness.

Despite attaining a master’s status, Kramer remains in awe of steel’s unsolved mysteries. Like a mad alchemist, he cannot stop tinkering with steel recipes, forging together different metal blocks and powders to ennoble iron with just the right amount of nickel, manganese, or some other selection of chemistry’s basic elements. The amalgams continue to respond in ways that baffle the most experienced metallurgists. Even so, he has not done badly. One morning, the no-nonsense culinary magazine Cook’s Illustrated called his shop, in Olympia, Washington, and ordered one of his knives to include in an equipment-rating article. Kramer worked into the night for three days, and then shipped off an eight-inch chef ’s knife. When the magazine’s story ran, last year, it included a small sidebar asking whether such a seemingly straightforward knife could be worth its exorbitant cost (four hundred and seventy-five dollars, at the time). The editors’ answer: “Yes. The Kramer knife outperformed every knife we’ve ever rated.” Kramer’s backlog of orders, already long, immediately jumped to two years. A few months later, the kitchen-supply chain Sur La Table asked Kramer to design a commercial line of knives, which the store introduced this fall. As he prepared for his mass-market début, Kramer made a series of trips, including a few to Japan, the High Church of steelmaking, where his commercial knives are being manufactured. Kramer’s itineraries matched the way he lives: a restless, almost insatiable search for essences, for the soul of craftsmanship, for perfection in a household tool.

Most bladesmiths come out of the ranchlands and hunting hollows of rural America, and they look, speak, and dress like throwbacks to the days of the covered wagon. By contrast, Kramer—who has been not only a chef but also a waiter, a folk-art importer, an improvisational-theatre performer, and, for a year in his twenties, a Ringling Brothers clown—arrives at knife shows looking like a Silicon Valley entrepreneur: button-down silk shirts, neatly pressed slacks, a thin goatee on a sharp face. Now fifty, and a trim five feet ten, Kramer is upbeat and alert, and he moves fast. Talking to him can be like playing with a dog; his face seems to be constantly on the lookout for fun. He is almost allergic to advance planning. One morning in 1997, when he was refining the design for his chef ’s knife, a passerby, stunned by the sight of a blacksmith’s shop in downtown Seattle (Kramer moved to Olympia in 2005), popped in and started badgering him with ideas. Rather than drive the visitor away, Kramer listened to him. It turned out that the man was a sailor, and he was adamant that the shape of Kramer’s blade should match the lines of a Six-Metre sloop—a curve, he argued, that holds universal value. That line remains one of the hallmarks of a Kramer knife.

Earlier this year, when Kramer took me inside his shop (a quintessential prefab industrial cavern), he explained why he’s no longer a chef: “I decided I wanted to make something that lasted longer than a meal.” Tools, thick leather aprons and gloves, dusty old swords, and strips of steel in various stages of knifeness were strewn everywhere. Stacked along one wall were approximately a hundred plates (six feet long, two feet wide, a quarter inch thick) of Kramer’s favorite grade of steel. The pile would last three to four years, since Kramer makes an average of only five knives a week. (Most knife factories, even small ones, make that many in an hour.) Surrounding the steel was a cornucopia of metal in various forms: bars and rods of assorted lengths, thicknesses, and grades; bags of specialized powders; and a scattering of power tools that hammer, cut, or squeeze.

During my visit, Kramer was absorbed in one of his incessant studies—this time, an attempt to replicate the legendary achievements of Frank J. Richtig. In 1936, Richtig, a Nebraska blacksmith, made “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” for an act that he performed at state and county fairs: according to “Ripley’s,” this was a man who “cuts cold steel . . . auto parts, railroad spikes, buggy axles, etc., with a butcher knife, and then cuts paper with the same knife!” (Cutting paper may not sound like much, but it’s a surprisingly demanding test of blade sharpness which is still in use, even in modern factories.) Richtig supposedly had a special system for heat-treating his blades, which he never revealed. To this day, scholarly papers occasionally appear in the annals of metallurgy which attempt to uncover Richtig’s methods. “I would love to crack this,” Kramer told me. “If I could do that, game over. I win!”

Kramer began his Richtig experiment the way he makes his standard custom knives: he ran a steel plate through a band saw, cutting out several knife-shaped chunks, and then, with a pair of tongs, laid one on a brick in his forge—a two-foot-square, gas-fired kiln. Kramer normally uses a pyrometer to tell him when a blade has reached its critical temperature. But on this particular day the gauge was on the blink, so he had to work the way that Richtig and centuries of samurai swordsmen before him did: by eye. Visual acuity is paramount in bladesmithing, because slight temperature variances can mean the difference between a blade that’s tough and another that’s brittle. Within two minutes, this blade was a glowing orange, just shy of fifteen hundred degrees. Kramer picked up his tongs, removed the blade, and dropped it on the floor to cool. (The standard blacksmithing image has the smith beating the blade with a hammer at this point; while many still do this, to eliminate bubbles and the like, it’s seldom necessary with today’s industrially rolled steel.) After ten minutes, when the blade was cool enough to handle, Kramer gave it a quick, blunt edge on a grinding wheel. Then he wrapped a wire around its handle end and dangled it in a series of containers full of molten salt. The first of these baths, which sets the steel up for hardening, simmers near forging temperatures. The last, a luxurious two-hour soak that matches the baking levels of a household oven, lets the steel relax; as the atoms inside the steel gradually migrate away from one another, they settle into roomy corners free of pressure from their neighbors. This is the “tempering” stage, the final step that keeps a blade from being fragile. (Sometimes—depending on the grade of steel, and the hardness levels that Kramer is after—a knife will, before tempering, take a dip in a warm bucket of oil, or another full of dry ice and acetone.) After lunch, Kramer pulled the blade from its final salt bath and hung it on a wire rack to cool. Ten minutes later, he was standing in his sharpening room, slowly rocking the knife against a series of sandpaper belt grinders, coarse- and fine-grit wheels, and, finally, a soft cotton wheel coated with a waxy green polishing compound. Kramer now asked me to lay a long bolt across his anvil. He picked up the newly forged knife, held it on top of the bolt, reached for a heavy forging hammer, and started banging away. The bolt gave, but so did the knife. Damage to bolt: a quarter-inch cut. Damage to knife: a sixteenth-inch chip.