A Knife for Strawberries
My son-in-law works as a safety officer at a berry farm and, as a consequence, occasionally gets to bring home some of the “reject” berries—fruit that’s too big, too small, slightly misshapen, or somehow offensive to the delicate sensibilities of the major supermarket chains.
Once you sort through them and remove the crushed or overripe ones—which all seem to end up in the same bucket—the berries are still every bit as good as the perfectly presented supermarket versions.
So my daughter Sam has been busy making jam and freezing berries for smoothies.
A little while ago she asked if I could make her a strawberry knife.
Not a large kitchen knife or anything elaborate—just something small, light, and comfortable to use, with a mid-sized blade that would make preparing strawberries quicker and easier.
I love requests like this.
As much as I enjoy making beautiful knives, there’s something especially satisfying about creating a tool for a very specific job. It changes the process a bit. You start thinking less about what the knife looks like on the bench, and more about how it’s actually going to feel after half an hour of hulling strawberries.
How it sits in the hand.
How nimble it feels.
How easily the blade moves through soft fruit without bruising it.
They’re small considerations, but they matter.
For this knife, I knew I wanted to use stainless steel. Something practical and easy to care for, given how much contact it would have with fruit and moisture. For the handle, I chose a beautiful piece of bird’s eye Huon pine that I had been saving for something special.
I wanted to keep the overall design quite simple, so I matched it with brass bolsters and pins, along with a single black G10 spacer between the brass and the pine. Sometimes just a small detail is enough to bring everything together.
The first attempt actually taught me something important.
I made the blade a little too short. But one of the advantages of making something for family is that you get honest feedback during the process, and that gave me the chance to have another go before calling it finished.
The second version ended up exactly where it needed to be.
That’s another part of making knives I enjoy—sometimes the process itself tells you what the knife wants to become.
And now there’s a knife in Sam’s kitchen designed specifically for preparing strawberries. A small thing, perhaps, but also the sort of thing that quietly becomes part of everyday life.
Because good tools don’t just help you get the job done.
They make the job itself a little more enjoyable.