Hanu Salm and his father, Rolf Pechukas, just finished building a small workshop behind the Wellfleet house of Salm’s grandmother, Diana Gisolfi. It’s a temporary setup for Salm. He would like to build his own house and shop someday. For now, a sign nailed to a nearby tree marks the craftsman’s home base. It displays the House of Salm family crest, “two salmon on a shield,” a reminder for Salm of his family’s blacksmithing history.
“My great-great-great-grandfather was a semi-famous blacksmith in Germany,” he says. The crest, imprinted on the blade of every knife Salm makes, holds him to a high standard, he says.
Just inside the doorway of Salm’s workshop is an 18th-century cast-iron anvil and a simple venturi forge burner. There is also a row of large hammers on the wall alongside a few other tools: a hand-operated arbor press, a stake anvil, and another little anvil on a stump.
At the moment, Salm is making a simple oyster knife. With tongs he made from rebar, he pulls a small, narrow piece of red-hot high-carbon steel from the forge. It hisses in the air as he moves it to the anvil. Salm lifts a hammer and goes to work, slamming the metal into shape with steady, percussive clangs. When the oyster knife has cooled to a dull red, Salm plunges it back into the forge to reheat.
Salm says has always been into “making stuff.” His father worked as an architect and a furniture maker — a “jack-of-all-trades type of dude,” says Salm. “I grew up in his shop.”
At Nauset High School, Salm learned the basics of metalworking from Jody Craven, the metal arts teacher, and Karl Hoyt, now retired, who presided in the woodshop. Salm then went to Red Rocks Community College in Colorado, where, as a part of the fine woodworking program, he learned the art of lutherie. He graduated in 2018 and moved to Rockland, taking a job with a wind energy company and then going to work for the Dept. of Conservation and Recreation on the Boston Harbor Islands. When things slowed down during Covid, Salm moved home to Wellfleet.
He’s using the opportunity to turn back to craftsmanship. He guesses he has made somewhere between 50 and 100 knives this year — the first ones he has sold, mostly to home cooks. His knives are also displayed at Tazza Kitchenware & Pantry in the center of Wellfleet.
“I’m cranking out a lot of oyster knives,” he says. “Those are selling because it’s Wellfleet.” But he would like to start making a range of tools for restaurants.
Chef’s knives offer more design freedom, says Salm. “It’s a bigger knife, a bigger canvas. If you’re doing forge welds, where you have layers of nickel,” says Salm, who often uses the technique, “you get much cooler patterns on bigger knives than small ones.”
Salm’s knives are elegant. Steel handles, drawn out from the steel of the blade during the forging process, are often curved in delicate loops, and the wooden handles are smooth and light. The blades vary in design: some are plain, some have a thin stripe of color, like lightning. Some are forge-welded so that different layers of metal seem to pour down from the top edge like the tide washing onto the shore.
That process involves melting metals against the steel blade, heating them to a critical temperature until they melt into the blade and become part of it, then grinding away the excess thickness.
“It’s important to me that the knives are functional first,” says Salm. “ ‘Pretty to look at’ comes second.” To Salm, “A perfect knife cuts perfectly.” Of all the knives he’s made, he says he really uses only three: a Santoku knife (a large, wide-bladed Japanese-style knife, good for slicing and moving food to the pan), a Nakiri knife (a slim, straight-edged Japanese-style chopping knife), and a small filet and paring knife. “I guess you could count my bread knife, too,” he adds. “It’s a weird, cracked Santoku that I cut serrations into to get rid of the cracks.
“I don’t have a knife for every little thing,” says Salm. “That’s why I like Santokus. If you’re going to buy one knife, I’d make it a Santoku.” They’re also one of his favorite knives to forge. For a blacksmith who says he believes functionality is beauty, a Santoku — big, light, and versatile — is assuredly beautiful. In Japanese, “santoku” means “three uses,” which, for cooks, are chopping, mincing, and dicing.
Half the week, Salm works with his friend Zach Doucette doing landscaping, hardscaping, and masonry. “Last week we were digging out a foundation on someone’s house and restacking a cinder block wall,” he says. His precise and intricate work on knives provides a contrast he says he needs.
After forging, Salm heats the blade to a specific temperature determined by the type of steel used. Then he cools it in oil, water, or air to harden it. After that, he’ll temper the blade by reheating it, but to a cooler temperature than before — this softens the spine of the blade but enhances the toughness of the edge, reducing the chance of breakage.
Then Salm uses a belt grinder to sharpen the blade. Dozens of belts hang from hooks above the machine; some feel soft as suede, some far coarser than sandpaper.
The tang of a knife is the extension of the blade into the handle and is the focus of the next decision to be made. Salm often opts for a hidden tang — the bottom of the blade disappears into the handle. A full tang looks like a stripe of metal down the length of the handle, visible from both sides.
He makes his handles from materials like steel, wood, bone, horn, and Micarta — a composite of materials set in resin. He also makes sheaths with a core layer of leather, cut out to the blade shape, sandwiched between two other pieces of leather, with polished wood on the outside.
Eventually, says Salm, he’d like to get into metallurgy: “I want to maybe start making my own alloys,” he says. “That’s down the road.”
Not every knife comes out perfectly. On a small table sits a collection of blades ranging in size from large Santokus to dainty pen knives. “These are all reject knives,” says Salm, waving his hand in their direction. Each has something a little wrong with it, he says, though they look fine to the untrained eye: two of the smaller knives have looped steel handles, each cradling a sphere of polished wood. One bigger knife is wearing a glossy sheath.
Two large knives are lying at the edge of the table. They have smooth wooden handles; their blades are artfully streaked and speckled. “There’s nothing wrong with those two,” he says.
