This Kitchen-Saavy Bladesmith Made a Functional Knife Out of…Jelly?

About a week ago, I talked about how YouTube user kiwami japan made an insanely sharp knife out of an Amazon cardboard box. Somewhere in the same article, I mentioned in passing about how he recently made a knife out of jelly. Well, curiosity got the better of me, so I had to see how he actually did it.

Unlike cardboard, which has at least a little bit of hardness property to it, jelly has almost no solid properties. Unless frozen, even a baby could tear it apart with its soft hands. So it’s amusing to see kiwami do the exact opposite and melt many jellies into a fine liquid. To keep the mixture’s color uniform, he adds a bit of food coloring.

Putting the mixture to one side, kiwami works on a heated mixture of gelatin. He then adds it to his jelly mixture and mixes the whole thing up. While the mixture sets, he removes any air bubbles which could interfere with the knife’s construction.

After letting the mixture simmer for three hours, he pours it into a tray and puts it in the refrigerator for one whole day. Just like with the cardboard knife, he traces a knife outline onto a piece of paper and then on some plastic.

Come the next day, the jelly has reacquired some of its solid properties and is ready for carving. He lays the jelly onto his plastic knife stencil and begins cutting away at it with a small blade.

Once the blade is carved and the excess jelly has been stored away as a future snack, kiwami sticks the blade in between two sheets of metal and places it over an air purifier for one day to let it dry.

The next day, kiwami does what he does best, which is grabbing anything remotely knife-shaped and taking it to a whetstone. He starts sharpening the jelly blade on a #150 diamond whetstone before taking it to a #1,000 diamond whetstone, a #6,000 whetstone, a #12,000 whetstone, and lastly on a #30,000 whetstone, to make the blade sharp as a tack.

During this sharpening process, he doesn’t forget to file down the handle of the blade to make handling this edible knife easier (you don’t want to accidentally grab the sharp end of a knife, after all).

The finished blade can cut through both paper and cucumbers – kiwami’s victims of choice. This isn’t a blade which can hold up to a real knife, but just being able to make something out of jelly which is sharp enough to cut vegetables is a big enough achievement.

Content with another knife-time achievement, kiwami takes the jelly knife and melts it down with the excess jelly. He pours the jelly back into the little cup containers and pops them into the fridge, ready for snack time.

This is by far his tastiest knife yet. You can see kiwami japan’s other knife works on his YouTube channel, but I doubt you’ll find one this sweet!

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